Michael Braun

Michael Braun

Associate Professor of Management Science (Marketing Group)

MIT Sloan School of Management

100 Main St., E62-535

Cambridge, MA 02139

Michael Braun is Associate Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The core of his research program is in finding complex and interesting data structures in business and marketing contexts; constructing and estimating probability models to "tell a story" about the underlying customer behavior; and using those models to address practical marketing and management issues. He has written on, spoken on, and taught about applications of probability models to marketing and business problems as diverse as forecasting, customer retention, customer lifetime value, marketing ROI, social networking models, segmentation and targeting strategies, real-time customization of website design, and how customers decide to file insurance claims.  He is also interested more generally in Bayesian statistical modeling, and alternative, efficient Bayesian estimation and computation methods.

Professor Braun’s work has been published in top academic publications such as Marketing Science, Management Science, and, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and he is a member of the Marketing Science Editorial Review Board.  In 2010, his paper on "Website Morphing,"  was a finalist for the prestigious John D. C. Little Award, which is awarded to the best marketing article published in an INFORMS-sponsored journal. His paper on "Modeling the ‘Pseudodeductible' in Insurance Claims Decisions" won the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society Best Student Paper Award in 2006.  He has held several leadership positions for the American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics and Marketing, including Section Chair in 2011 and Program Chair for 2009 and 2013, and he is the author of three software packages for the R statistical computing language.

In 2010, Professor Braun launched a new class at MIT: Customer Analytics Using Probability Models. His educational objective is to train the next generation of business leaders on how to analyze and interpret marketing data to address real-world managerial problems. He takes a hands-on approach with the class, believing that managers cannot effectively act on the volumes of customer data that they collect, unless they master a foundational set of quantitative, statistical tools.  This class gives students a competitive edge in the marketplace, where the exploitation of data and information often is a determining factor in business success. He has also taught the introductory MBA class on Marketing Management, and an MBA elective on the Marketing of New Products. 

Michael Braun earned his Ph.D. in Operations and Information Management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds an A.B. with Honors in Economics from Princeton University, and an M.B.A. from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Before entering academia, he worked on the development and deployment of broadband Internet products for such companies as Comcast, Marcus Cable and Charter Communications. From 1999 to 2002, he was Vice President for Global Affiliate Operations of Chello Broadband, the Amsterdam-based Internet arm of United Pan-Europe Communications. An avid sports fan, he also worked as a production assistant at ESPN, and as a researcher for NBC at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. His bike rides to work are short hops, compared to his past rides up the west coast of Newfoundland, though Slovakia from Budapest to Krakow, and across Switzerland (lengthwise).