PhD in Marketing
Our Marketing PhD Program gives you a strong theoretical foundation and builds your empirical skills.
You’ll have the flexibility to explore marketing through Chicago Booth while taking courses across the university in psychology, sociology, economics, computer science, and statistics. You’ll also have access to computer science courses at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC).
The doctoral program defines marketing broadly as the study of the interface between firms, competitors, and consumers. This includes but is not limited to consumer preferences, consumer demand and decision-making, strategic interaction of firms, pricing, promotion, targeting, product design/positioning, and channel issues.
Our Distinguished Marketing Faculty
Chicago Booth’s marketing faculty serve as advisors, mentors, and collaborators to doctoral students.
Alumni Success
PhD alumni in marketing go on to successful careers at top institutions of higher education across the world.
Katherine Burson, MBA ’04, PhD ’04
Associate Professor of Marketing
Ross School of Business University of Michigan
Katherine Burson studies judgment and decision-making in consumer behavior such as systematic biases in self-assessment, biases in numerical processing, and the antecedents of the biases. She has a PhD in marketing.
Sridhar Narayanan, PhD ’05
Associate Professor of Marketing
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Sridhar Narayanan’s research focuses on empirical analysis of marketing problems. He has studied problems such as online advertising, peer effects, and learning. Currently, his research is focused on online advertising and modernization of small retail businesses. His PhD is in marketing.
The PhD Experience at Booth
Rima Toure-Tillery, PhD ’13, talks about the Booth faculty’s open-door approach to PhD students.
Rima Toure-Tillery, ’13: 00:00
I am assistant professor at Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management. And I am a motivation scholar. I study questions related to factors that influence people's motivation to persist in various types of goals.
Rima Toure-Tillery, ’13: 00:21
I think the PhD's very different from an MBA. You expect to be doing very different things when you're done. With a PhD most of us expect to conduct research, continue to ask deep questions, and just work on finding answers to those questions.
Rima Toure-Tillery, ’13: 00:35
Booth PhD Program is extremely rigorous. You're going to learn from the best. There's a good mix of letting you be in charge of your career and being independent, but also being extremely supportive. Most faculty have an open-door policy so you could just email someone, go to their office and start talking about a research idea. They're really going to help you develop the whole research approach, and thinking about ideas, and taking them from that really half-baked stage to something more advanced. Being able to approach whatever faculty I'm most interested in working with, I think that really permeated my whole time here.
Rima Toure-Tillery, ’13: 01:13
Being in the program really helped me see things in a different light. I really developed some new research interests as I learned more about what I didn't know. You can't solve problems that you don't even know existed. It's been a really amazing experience.
A Network of Support
At Booth, you’ll have access to the resources of several research centers that help to fund marketing PhD research, host innovative conferences and workshops, and serve as focal points for collaboration and innovation.
James M. Kilts Center for Marketing
The Kilts Center facilitates faculty research, supports innovations in the marketing curriculum, funds scholarships for MBA students, and creates engaging programs aimed at enhancing the careers of students and alumni.
Center for Decision Research
Devoted to the study of how individuals form judgments and make decisions, the CDR supports research that examines the processes by which intuition, reasoning, and social interaction produce beliefs, judgments, and choices.
Scholarly Journals
Chicago Booth is responsible for the creation and leadership of some of the most prestigious academic journals today. Quantitative Marketing and Economics, for example, which focuses on problems important to marketing using a quantitative approach, was founded in 2003 by Peter E. Rossi, MBA ’80, PhD ’84.
Spotlight on Current Research
Our faculty and PhD students continually produce high-level research. The Chicago Booth Review frequently highlights their contributions in marketing.
Walter Zhang's BFI Industrial Organization Initiative Award
The Becker Friedman Institute will fund Zhang's research project, "Targeted Bundling" (coauthor: Olivia Natan). This project studies the pricing of digital goods and the potential for increased price targeting in differentiated product markets.
Walter Zhang's BFI Industrial Organization Initiative Award
Are You Looking at Me?
Booth faculty and PhD alumni investigate the behavioral explanations for why companies like to turn products into people.
Are You Looking at Me?
Are You Ready for Personalized Pricing?
Companies are figuring out what individual customers will pay—and charging accordingly. Chicago Booth’s Sanjog Misra explores new ways to set prices.
Are You Ready for Personalized Pricing?
Why the Power of TV Advertising Has Been Overstated
Research from Chicago Booth’s Bradley Shapiro and Günter J. Hitsch suggests television advertising may be considerably less effective than published studies suggest.
Why the Power of TV Advertising Has Been OverstatedMeet Our Students
PhD students in marketing choose Chicago Booth because our multidisciplinary approach gives them the tools and training for a successful career. Recent dissertations have examined everything from customer retention and consumer purchasing decisions to the economics of retail food waste. Recent graduates have accepted positions at leading research institutions, including UCLA and Columbia University, and have gone on to data science careers in industry.
Vanessa Alwan
Salman Arif
Soaham Bharti
Samuel Borislow
Sara Drango
Lin Fei
Fatemeh Gheshlaghpour
Nicholas Herzog
Stephanie Hong
Quoc Dang Hung Ho
Minkwang Jang
Daniel Katz
Yuxiao Li
Juan Mejalenko
Natalie Moore
Timothy Schwieg
Semyon Tabanakov
Yusu Wang
Jiaqi Yu
Ningyin (Ariel) Xu
Shuqiong (Lydia) Zhao
Program Expectations and Requirements
The Stevens Program at Booth is a full-time program. Students generally complete the majority of coursework and examination requirements within the first two years of studies and begin work on their dissertation during the third year.
For details, see General Examination Requirements by Area in the Stevens Program Guidebook.
Download the Guidebook