Kathleen Li Receives 2023 Frank M. Bass Best Paper Award

Honor recognizes outstanding research in marketing

The Society for Marketing Science has awarded the 2023 Frank M. Bass Dissertation Paper Award to Kathleen T. Li, assistant professor of marketing at Texas McCombs School of Business.

One of the marketing field’s most prestigious honors, the Frank M. Bass Award is given annually to the best marketing paper derived from a Ph.D. thesis that has appeared in print in an INFORMS journal. The 2023 award is for papers published during that year.

In an article titled “Augmented Difference-in-Differences,” Li developed an innovative tool for understanding causal relationships in marketing, allowing researchers to solve previously unanswerable questions using quasi-experimental designs. Co-authored with Christophe Van den Bulte, this article based on her dissertation was published in the journal Marketing Science.

The new statistical method measures the causal impact of a marketing intervention by combining the benefits of two commonly used statistical methods — synthetic control and difference-in-difference. “When the difference-in-difference method is too restrictive, the augmented difference-in-difference method serves as a flexible solution,” she said. “It is especially useful when there is a short time before the marketing intervention, a situation where the synthetic control method may not apply.”

The Bass Award’s editorial review board anticipate Li’s work will have an impressive impact on researchers studying a variety of subjects in marketing and economics. Despite her paper being just a year old, it has already influenced researchers studying the connection between bus transportation and real estate, and those looking into the correlation between low minimum wage and involvement in multilevel marketing.

Li has won other prestigious awards for her scholarship, including the 2023 Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar and the 2024 McCombs CBA Foundation Research Excellence Award for Assistant Professors. In addition, her papers have been selected as finalists for the 2023 John D.C. Little Award, which recognizes the best marketing paper published in an INFORMS journal, and the 2023 Paul E. Green Award, which recognizes the best Journal of Marketing Research article that shows or demonstrates the most potential to contribute significantly to the practice of marketing research and research in marketing.

Andrew Gershoff, chair of the Texas McCombs School of Business Department of Marketing, said this most recent award recognizes the clarity and impact that Li’s work brings, not only to the field of marketing but to broader efforts of research in social science fields.

“Dr. Li is both a brilliant researcher and outstanding communicator who has a significant impact as a scholar and as a professor in the classroom,” he said. “We are so fortunate to have her with us as a researcher in the Marketing Department.”