Three generations

In 1994, I was among the first PhD students to graduate from the PhD program at INSEAD. The school’s commitment to making a name for itself in PhD training was very strong, with a lot of faculty motivated to be involved in this exciting new program. Being there with a group of fun and motivated fellow students proved to be a perfect environment for me to pursue my interests as a researcher.

In the first eight or so years after graduation, I was able to get my research career started, collaborating among others with Luc Wathieu (INSEAD, 1995), managed to become an effective instructor, and was tenured at UCLA; just a year ahead of Pedro Santa Clara and Charles Corbett (both INSEAD 1996).

Sometime in 2002, Paulo Albuquerque became my first PhD student. Taking a PhD class I was teaching, I figured out pretty quickly that Paulo was a sharp student. When he asked me if I wanted to work with him on research ideas about demand estimation and empirical industrial organization, it required little reflection on my part to say yes and become his PhD advisor. Thinking back now, Paulo was a very easy student and it was a great learning experience for me to have worked with him on various projects. After graduation in 2006, Paulo was appointed at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester and he was tenured there in 2014. Indeed, we continued working as colleagues and still learn from each other.

Paulo has moved to my alma mater and became a marketing professor in Fountainebleau. It is rewarding to see that Paulo himself has become a PhD advisor to INSEAD students in the program that I was once in myself.

I have admired INSEAD as a business school ever since starting my undergraduate studies in management in 1993, probably because, at the time, António Borges, a Portuguese professor, had just become the dean of the school. During my undergraduate degree and in the following couple of years while I was working in industry, I aspired to join INSEAD in some capacity, either for an MBA, and later for a PhD, as I became more interested in academic research and teaching.

Although I did apply to the INSEAD PhD program, I joined UCLA for my graduate studies in 2001, where I met Bart Bronnenberg. His class was my first PhD seminar there and the class that I remember the best today. Students had to become experts on a topic and face hard questions from fellow students and from Bart for three hours. Although challenging to us, it was great fun – I now model one of my PhD classes after that approach. Shortly after, it was clear that our research interests were very much aligned, since we both liked to study how geography impacts consumer decisions, and overall, we got along very well, which is something to consider since the advisor-student relationship that lasts for about 5 years.

Bart was and still is a masterful motivator, and his guidance was exactly right to get me through the program and into a school (Rochester), where I could develop as a professor. INSEAD reached out to me in 2013 to join as an associate professor, 20 years after my initial interest, and I was happy to accept the opportunity to teach and do research at the school that had given the PhD degree to my former advisor.

Joining the school in 2014, I was extremely lucky to meet Dinara, who also joined at that time and became my first student here at INSEAD. I have seen her grow immensely in the past three years, from the 1st-year student to a “colleague” that is able to stand her ground when discussing research and is confident when she presents in the classroom or in a conference. She keeps me on my feet and motivates me to work on related research, challenges me with interesting ideas, and keeps a high level of energy and attention on her projects. She still has a couple of years to go, but I am very confident that she will make me and INSEAD very proud when she becomes a Marketing professor.

Dinara Akchurina

In the middle of my undergraduate studies, I became very interested in industrial organization – understanding how firms choose their marketing strategy and how consumers react to it – and I decided to pursue my career in academia. I was very happy to be accepted to the PhD program in marketing at INSEAD – one of the top business schools, – but the fact that Paulo was moving to INSEAD was the key reason to join the program. I read Paulo’s research on empirical models of demand and consumer search, and I realized that our research interests are very much aligned. In addition, Paulo interviewed me at the last stage of a PhD application process, and his very friendly attitude was extremely encouraging.

Doing research for me is about finding a right balance between freedom and self-discipline. On the one hand, in research, as in any creative process, there is no algorithm to come up with novel and interesting ideas – is important to stay open-minded and keep interest in different topics (or sometimes even different research fields) in order to have a fresh view on the broad problem you investigate. On the other hand, to stay efficient and avoid wasting time on unproductive activities, it is necessary to impose self-discipline and keep working even if research question is not clearly framed yet or current results are ambiguous.

I am very lucky to work with Paulo who guides me to find the right balance between those two parts of a research process. On the one hand, we have regular weekly meetings where we discuss our progress, problems that should be solved and come up with a «to-do list» for the next week. On the other hand, we stay very flexible about modeling approaches and sometimes even the aspects of the problem we would like to model. For instance, in our ongoing research project, we develop an empirical model that could help managers to design educational software for children. The interesting feature of this market is that the main user of the product, a child, is different from the buyer, a parent of this child, and goals of those two could be different. At some point in the middle of the project, we were stuck on how to coherently quantify the misalignment between a child and his parent. We made a significant progress when we looked at the problem as a time allocation problem by a child: a child might not necessarily spend enough time on learning the material that would convince a parent to pay for the software. Those time allocation models are very widespread in transportation literature, but to a lesser extent in marketing. This combination of flexibility and structure that Paulo combines in advising and educating students provides a pleasure of working together and is a key to staying motivated and persistent in doing research.