The Marketing Science Institute (MSI) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Alden G. Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition.  

Started in 1984, this annual competition is intended to encourage doctoral work on topics of importance to the marketing community.  

The winners were selected from more than 70 submissions. Evaluations of each submission were solicited from outside academic experts. We are grateful to all the marketing scholars who generously contributed their time to serve as reviewers.    

The competition winner received $3,000. Winners and those who received honorable mentions are invited to attend MSI Forum 2026, where their work will be acknowledged.    

WINNER     

Ningyin Xu, University of Chicago
Advisor: Jean-Pierre Dube
Reference-Dependent Pricing 

HONORABLE MENTIONS     

Mengyao Huang, University of California, Berkeley
Advisor: J. Miguel Villas-Boas
Modeling Endogenous Spatial Experiments with Managerial Preferences 

Carolina Raffaelli, University of California, San Diego 
Advisor: Wendy Liu and Uma Karmarkar 
Unpacking Product Usage

Anya Shchetkina, University of Pennsylvania  
Advisor: Ron Berman
Blind Targeting: Personalization under Third-Party Privacy Constraints 

Eric Zhou, Boston University
Advisor: Dokyun Lee
Human Creativity and Creative Markets in the Age of Generative AI