Michael Braun

Michael Braun 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 effectiveness, and public policy issues. He has written on, spoken on, and taught about management topics such as online advertising and A-B testing, the interplay among shoplifting and marketing activities, customer retention and valuation, marketing ROI, social  networking models, segmentation and targeting strategies, and insurance decisions. He is also an expert in Bayesian statistical methodology and computation.

Professor Braun is an Associate Editor for Marketing Science, an Area Editor for International Journal of Research in Marketing, and a member of the Editorial Review Board for Journal of Marketing Research. In addition to those journals, his research has been published in many other leading academic outlets such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Management Science, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. In addition, he is the author of three software packages for the R statistical computing language, two of which were peer-reviewed for the Journal of Statistical Software. He has held several leadership positions for the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Marketing, including Section Chair and three terms as Program Chair.

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. Most recently, he has been teaching the core Marketing Management course in Cox’s full-time and working professional M.B.A. programs, where he displays his high-energy and Socratic style. He has also taught Managerial Statistics in the Cox School’s M.B.A. and M.S. programs, as well as Customer Analytics Using Probability Models in the M.S. in Business Analytics program. Overall, he believes that managers cannot effectively act on the volumes of customer data that they collect unless they master a foundational set of conceptual, quantitative, and statistical tools.

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.