Harikesh Nair

Harikesh Nair received his PhD in Marketing at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 2005 and is Assistant Professor in Marketing at Stanford GSB. Nair received his MS in Transportation Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and his B.Tech in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Madras, India.

His dissertation focuses on the issue of intertemporal price discrimination, a policy of dynamic market segmentation by firms to appeal to consumers of varying valuations, who sequentially exit the market after purchase. In an application to the market for video-games in the US, he found that such strategic pricing behavior by firms can explain key empirical features of the industry, including the high introductory levels and subsequent rates of decline of video-game prices over time. Further, policy experiments revealed that the value of optimal pricing in this industry is large, and that consumer expectations about future price declines play an important role in determining the optimal sequence of prices over time.

More generally, he is interested in empirical analysis of issues related to high-technology product-markets. Such markets are typically characterized by inter-dependence in demand for hardware and compatible software. In one study, he and his co-authors measured empirically such “indirect network effects” in the US market for Personal Digital Assistants (PDA-s). In other work, he and his co-authors have developed methodologies for analyzing aggregate store-level demand in grocery product categories, and also for measuring empirically the speed of diffusion of newly introduced products across countries. Broadly, he is interested in empirical applications of industrial organization models and Bayesian statistics to analyzing marketing problems. His research has been published (or is forthcoming at) International Journal of Research in Marketing, Marketing Science, and Quantitative Marketing and Economics.