Foreword—Revisiting the Workshop on Quantitative Marketing and Structural Econometrics

This foreword and the subsequent four invited articles were commissioned by Eric T. Bradlow while Editor-in-Chief of Marketing Science. The foreword was written in four parts; each part covers a different aspect of the Workshop on Quantitative Marketing and Structural Econometrics. The workshop was cosponsored by Columbia Business School, Duke University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science and was held at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University in August 2010. The introductory section, written by Bradlow, covers why he commissioned these articles in the first place. In his section, Jean-Pierre Dubé discusses "going from good to great" in the structural econometrics area as applied to marketing problems. A section jointly written by Brett R. Gordon and Raphael Thomadsen (both co-organizers of the workshop) discusses the workshop itself and some important thoughts for those people doing "structural econometrics in the trenches." Finally, co-workshop organizer Richard Staelin's section provides some perspective on both the workshop and structural econometrics as they relate to analytical models and empirical work for quantitative marketing researchers.