Bio

Michael Braun, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Cox School of
Business, joined the SMU community in 2013 after seven years on the
faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management.  The core of his
research is the statistical analysis of large and complex customer
databases, with an emphasis on customer lifetime value, advertising
effectives, and public policy issues. He has written on, spoken on,
and taught about management topics such as sales forecasting, customer
retention and valuation, marketing ROI, social networking models,
segmentation and targeting strategies, online advertising and
insurance decisions.  Professor Braun’s work has been published in top
academic publications such as Marketing Science, Management Science,
and the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and he is a
member of the Marketing Science Editorial Review Board. He has held
several leadership positions for the American Statistical
Association's Section on Statistics and Marketing, including Section
Chair in 2011 and Program Chair in 2009, 2013 and 2015.  In addition,
he is the author of four software packages for the R statistical
computing language.

Professor Braun’s teaching interests are to train the next generation
of business leaders on how to analyze, interpret and use marketing
data to address real-world managerial problems. He takes a hands-on
approach with his classes, believing that managers cannot effectively
act on the volumes of customer data that they collect, unless they
master a foundational set of quantitative, statistical tools. He
teaches the Managerial Statistics in the Cox School’s M.B.A. and other
graduate management programs, as well as Customer Analytics Using
Probability Models in the M.S. in Business Analytics program.

Michael Braun earned his Ph.D. from the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania.  He holds an A.B. with Honors in Economics
from Princeton University, and an M.B.A. from the Fuqua School of
Business at Duke University.  Before entering academia, he worked on
the development and deployment of broadband Internet products for such
companies as Comcast, Marcus Cable and Charter Communications. From
1999 to 2002, he was Vice President for Global Affiliate Operations of
Chello Broadband, the Amsterdam-based Internet arm of United
Pan-Europe Communications. He also worked as a production assistant at
ESPN, and as a researcher for NBC at the 1992 Summer Olympics in
Barcelona.

Teaching

Research

Customer loyalty, retention, and lifetime value
Empirical analysis of legal and policy issues
Advertising targeting and response
Bayesian methods and computation for marketing research and analytics

Select Publications

Braun, Michael (2017). “sparseHessianFD: Estimating Sparse Hessian Matrices in R.” Journal of Statistical Software, 82(10):1–22. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v082.i10. 

Braun, Michael and Paul Damien (2016). “Scalable Rejection Sampling for Bayesian Hierarchical Models.” Marketing Science, 35(3):427–444. https://doi.org/10/b4bd.

Braun, Michael, David A. Schweidel, and Eli M. Stein (2015). “Transaction Attributes and Customer Valuation.” Journal of Marketing Research, 52(6):848–864. https://doi.org/10/b4bb .

Braun, Michael (2014). “trustOptim: An R Package for Trust Region Optimization with Sparse Hessians.” Journal of Statistical Software, 60(4):1–16. https://doi.org/10/b4bc

Braun, Michael and Wendy W. Moe (2013). “Online Display Advertising: Modeling the Effects of Multiple Creatives and Individual Impression Histories.” Marketing Science, 32(5):753–767. https://doi.org/10/b4bf 

Braun, Michael and David A. Schweidel (2011). “Modeling Customer Lifetimes with Multiple Causes of Churn.” Marketing Science, 30(5):881–902. https://doi.org/10/ddv975

Working Papers

Braun, Michael (2018) sparseMVN: An R Package for Multivariate Normal Functions with Sparse Covariance and Precision Matrices.  https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=sparseMVN .