Vincent R. Nijs

Vincent Nijs is an Associate Professor of Business Analytics and Marketing at the Rady School of Management and inaugural Co-Director of Master of Science in Business Analytics program. He received his Ph.D. from KU Leuven in Belgium. His main research interests are in the areas of promotion and advertising impact, competitive retaliation, category captains, category management, pass-through of trade-promotions, and price rigidity.

Prior to Rady, Dr. Nijs was an assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. At Kellogg, he served as the McManus Research Professor, won the Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award for outstanding teaching in an elective course, and was recognized by the Marketing Science Institute as part of its Young Scholars program. At Rady, Nijs has been awarded Excellence in Teaching and Most Valuable Professor awards by students in both the MBA and MSBA programs.

Nijs currently teaches Customer Analytics to MBA and MSBA students and Math and Programming for Business Analytics to MSBA students. Tools he developed to support student learning in both the MBA and MSBA programs include Radiant, rsm-jupyter, and pyrsm.

Nijs holds a master's degree in marketing research from the University of Groningen and a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Leuven. He won the John D. C. Little Award and Frank M. Bass Award for the paper "The Category Demand Effects of Price Promotions," published in Marketing Science.

Selected publications

"Advertising spending patterns and competitor impact," with Maarten Gijsenberg (2019), International Journal of Research in Marketing, 36 (2), 232-250

"Outsourcing Retail Pricing to a Category Captain: The Role of Information Firewalls," with Kanishka Misra and Karsten Hansen (2013) Marketing Science, 33 (1), 66-81

"Wal-Mart’s Impact on Supplier Profits," with Qingyi Huang, Karsten Hansen, and Eric Anderson (2012) Journal of Marketing Research, 49 (2), 131-143

"Empirical Models of Manufacturer – Retailer Interaction," with Kusum Ailawadi, Eric Bradlow, Michaela Draganska, Robert Rooderkerk, K. Sudhir, Kenneth Wilbur and Jie Zhang (2010). Marketing Letters, 21 (3), 273-285

"Channel Pass-Through of Trade Promotions," with Kanishka Misra, Eric Anderson, Karsten Hansen and Lakshman Krishnamurthi (2010) Marketing Science, 29 (2), 250-267

"Demand-Based Pricing Versus Past-Price Dependence: A Cost-Benefit Analysis," with Shuba Srinivasan and Koen Pauwels (2008) Journal of Marketing, 72 (March), 15-27

"Retail-Price Drivers and Retailer Profits," with Shuba Srinivasan and Koen Pauwels (2007) Marketing Science, 26 (4), 473-487

"Competitive Reactions to Advertising and Promotion Attacks,"with Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp, Dominique M. Hanssens and Marnik G. Dekimpe (2005) Marketing Science, 24 (1), 35-54

"The Category-Demand Effects of Price Promotions," with Marnik G. Dekimpe, Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp and Dominique M. Hanssens (2001) Marketing Science, 20 (1), 1-22

 

Work in Progress

"Specific Counter-Conditioning of Brand Attitudes," with Miguel Brendl, Eva Walther, and Jana Moeller

 

Tools

Radiant is a platform-independent browser-based interface for business analytics in R. For more information see https://radiant-rstats.github.io/docs/. Radiant is used in Business Analytics, Quantitative Analysis, Research for Marketing Decisions, Applied Market Research, Consumer Behavior, Experiments in Firms, Pricing, Pricing Analytics, and Customer Analytics classes at the Rady School of Management. Other business schools that use Radiant include Marshall (USC), Kellogg (Northwestern), Olin (Washington University), Carlson (Minnesota), and Scheller (Georgia Tech) among others.

rsm-jupyter is a docker image and launch script used in the Rady MSBA program to provide students with a comprehensive analytics platform that includes Python, Jupter, R, Rstudio, Postgres, and PySpark. The image is designed to work on macOS, Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS and ensures that students and instructors have a consistent and fully reproducible computational environment that can also be used with JupyterHub and cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or MS Azure. Docker is the de facto standard in software development and can be used in MLOps to ensure consistency and reproducibility from model development through to production. For additional information and install instructions see https://github.com/radiant-rstats/docker.

pyrsm is python package available through PyPi and CondaForge that contains a set of functions and classes used in Customer Analytics for MSBA students. For additional information and install instructions see https://github.com/vnijs/pyrsm. An initial set of example notebooks is available here https://github.com/vnijs/pyrsm/tree/master/examples.

GitGadget (with Sanjiv Erat) is a tool to facilitate the use of git and GitLab for version control, (code) assignment submissions, and student collaboration. Version control is an essential component of MLOps and reproducible analytics and GitGadget provides easier access for both student and instructors. For additional information and install instructions see https://github.com/vnijs/gitgadget.

Research Areas

• Marketing Analytics
• Customer Analytics
• Competition
• Category Management
• Marketing Strategy
• Branding

Industry Areas

• Tech
• E-commerce
• Retail

For 2023-2024

• Customer Analytics (MBA and MSBA)
• Math and Programming for Business Analytics (MSBA)
• Math and Stats bootcamp (MBA and MSBA)