Affiliation
Skander Esseghaier is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Primary Research Focus
Internet marketing, software agents, internet user modeling, product recommendations, mass customization, personalization and data analytics, pricing, retailing and distribution channels, competitive strategies.

Contribution
Skander Esseghaier’s primary research areas include competitive strategies, Internet marketing, product recommendation, pricing, distribution channels and retailing. He has proposed a new attribute-based Bayesian preference modeling approach for making personalized product recommendations. The proposed attribute-based approach pools data across individuals and products. With this, he developed a product recommendation method that solves some of the key issues associated with traditional recommendation systems that are based on content and/or collaborative filtering methods: (i) collaborative filtering needs dense data sets to formulate reliable recommendations, whereas the method he proposed provide reliable recommendations even in the presence of sparse data sets; and (ii) unlike content filtering, the proposed method is able to leverage the information on preference similarity across individuals to formulate more reliable recommendations.

Exemplary Paper
Ansari, A.; Essegaier, S.; Kohli, R.: Internet Recommendation Systems, Journal of Marketing Research, 37 (3), August 2000, 363-375.
The paper is available here.

Education
Professor Esseghaier holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from Columbia University, New York, a M.Sc. in Discrete Mathematics from the University of London, and a M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Statistics and Economics from the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Economique, Paris.

Publications
Professor Esseghaier’s research has been published in in top-tier academic journals including the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science, the Journal of Applied Probability, and the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization.

Awards
Professor Esseghaier’s paper on Internet Recommendation Systems was a finalist for the 2005 William F. O’Dell Award which honors the Journal of Marketing Research article published in 2000 that has made the most significant long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice.

Misc.
Professor Esseghaier serves on the editorial boards for Customer Needs and Solutions and for Recherche et Applications en Marketing. Prior to joining Koc University, he was on the faculty at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and at the Stern School of Business at New York University. He was also a Visiting Professor at INSEAD, France and Singapore, and at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India.