Maria Ana Vitorino

Assistant Professor of Marketing, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

Contact Information

Primary Email:
vitorino@umn.edu

Research Interests: advertising, empirical industrial organization, entry and market structure, finance, game theory, pricing, regulation

Links: CV, Personal Website

Overview

Professor Vitorino’s research interests include firms’ pricing strategy, consumer-choice models and using game-theoretic models to explain the strategic impact of firms’ entry decisions. Broadly, she is interested in empirical applications of statistics and economic models of industrial organization to marketing.

Professor Vitorino also does research in the intersection of Marketing and Finance. More specifically, she is interested in understanding how firm value is affected by Marketing activities such as Advertising.

Research

Maria Ana Vitorino, David Muir, Katja Seim (Work In Progress), Price Transparency and Search Obfuscation.
Maria Ana Vitorino (2012), Understanding the Effect of Advertising on Stock Returns and Firm Value: Theory and Evidence from a Structural Model, Management Science, Conditionally Accepted.
Maria Ana Vitorino (2012), Empirical Entry Games with Complementarities: An Application to the Shopping Center Industry, Journal of Marketing Research, Forthcoming. Abstract
This paper proposes a strategic model of entry that allows for positive and negative spillovers among firms. The model is applied to a novel dataset containing information about the store configurations of all US regional shopping centers and is used to quantify the magnitude of inter-store spillovers. The author addresses the estimation difficulties that arise due to the presence of multiple equilibria by formulating the entry game as a Mathematical Problem with Equilibrium Constraints (MPEC). While this paper constitutes the first attempt to use this direct optimization approach to address a specific empirical problem, the method can be used in a wide range of structural estimation problems. The empirical results support the agglomeration and clustering theories that predict firms may have incentives to co-locate despite potential business stealing effects. It is shown that the firms’ negative and positive strategic effects help predict both how many firms can operate profitably in a given market and the firm-types configurations. The relative magnitude of such effects varies substantially across store-types.
David Muir, Katja Seim, Maria Ana Vitorino (Work In Progress), Market Size, Quality, and Competition: Evidence from Driving Schools.
Frederico Belo, Xiaoji Lin, Maria Ana Vitorino (Working), Brand Capital and Firm Value.
J.P. Dubé, Günter Hitsch, Peter Rossi, Maria Ana Vitorino (2008), Category Pricing with State Dependent Utility, Marketing Science, 27 (3), 417-429 (authors listed in alphabetical order). Abstract
There is substantial literature documenting the presence of state-dependent utility with packaged goods data. Typically, a form of brand loyalty is detected whereby there is a higher probability of purchasing the same brand as has been purchased in the recent past. The economic significance of the measured loyalty remains an open question. We consider the category pricing problem and demonstrate that the presence of loyalty materially affects optimal pricing. The prices of higher quality products decline relative to those of lower quality when loyalty is introduced into the model. Given the well-known problems with the confounding of state dependence and consumer heterogeneity, loyalty must be measured in a model which allows for an unknown and possibly highly nonnormal distribution of heterogeneity. We implement a highly flexible model of heterogeneity using multivariate mixtures of normals in a hierarchical choice model. We use an Euler equations approach to the solution of the dynamic pricing problem which allows us to consider a very large number of consumer types.