Dr. Dmitri Kuksov
- Professor of Marketing
- Ashbel Smith Professor
The University of Texas at Dallas supports the Ashbel Smith Professorship. Dr. Ashbel Smith was the first president of the UT System Board of Regents. He had a long and distinguished career in medicine, education and public service. During his term on the Board of Regents, Smith was dedicated to recruiting the best faculty members available and to developing a curriculum befitting a “university of the first class.” Smith became known as both the “father of Texas medicine” and the “father of The University of Texas.”
“The Naveen Jindal School of Management and UT Dallas provide an amazing research environment through encouraging creativity and recognizing valuable research, service and teaching contributions of the faculty and students. The growth of JSOM and UT Dallas and the improvement in their worldwide recognitions have been phenomenal. I am also sure the upward trajectory will continue for years to come.”
Dr. Dmitri Kuksov’s research often challenges conventional thinking about marketing strategies.
One of his studies in the journal Marketing Science found that when a retailer hosts a competitor’s ad on its website, profits can increase for both companies under certain circumstances. Another study in the journal discovered that although it may be impossible to predict which fashion items will become a season’s “it” product, the process follows a set of probability rules.
A central theme of most of Kuksov’s research is how uncertainty affects markets, especially when consumers can decide how much to invest in gathering information.
“When you realize you don’t have all the information you need to decide if you want to buy something, do you want to spend extra time to go to more stores?” Kuksov said. “My research asks, what is the effect of those search costs under different scenarios?”
In his dissertation study, Kuksov found that lower search costs — meaning the time and energy required to compare prices — can lead to higher prices.
The study won the 2005 Frank M. Bass Outstanding Dissertation Paper Award, and part of the research was published in Marketing Science.
Kuksov’s research has also been published in the Journal of Marketing Research and Quantitative Marketing and Economics. Kuksov is a department editor of Management Science, a senior editor of Production and Operations Management and an associate editor of Marketing Science. He has also served as a co-editor of Quantitative Marketing and Economics.
With PhDs in both marketing and math, Kuksov conducts theoretical research using quantitative techniques. Kuksov said his research interests stem from his own experiences and his observations.
He said he was drawn to the Naveen Jindal School of Management because of its focus on theoretical and quantitative marketing research. Kuksov joined UT Dallas in 2012 after teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. He earned a PhD in marketing from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in mathematics from Brigham Young University. Kuksov grew up in Belarus and earned his bachelor’s degree in math from Moscow State University.