Jeff Dotson
Assistant Professor of Marketing
Jeff Dotson is an expert on marketing research and theory. His research focuses on the development and application of Bayesian statistics to a variety of marketing problems, including linking customer satisfaction to firm financial performance and developing more accurate models of consumer decision making. He joined Owen after completing his Ph.D. in marketing at the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University, where he taught marketing research and served as a Teaching Assistant for courses in Bayesian statistics and marketing.
His research has been published or accepted for publication by such journals as Quantitative Marketing and Economics and Marketing Science, and he has presented his work at leading academic institutions including Brigham Young University, Harvard Business School, University of Iowa, University of Southern California, and INSEAD. In addition Dotson is actively involved in the marketing research practitioner community. He presented papers at the American Marketing Association’s Advanced Research Techniques (ART) Forum in 2007 and 2009, where he was runner-up (2007) and winner (2009) of the award for best presentation.
In 2007 and 2008 Dotson was honored as a Haring Symposium Fellow. He was also an INFORMS Doctoral Consortium Fellow in 2006. From 2005 to 2009 he was the recipient of the Davidson Doctoral Fellowship from the Fisher College of Business, and is currently a member of INFORMS, the American Marketing Association and the American Statistical Association.
Prior to his academic career, Dotson worked as a Category Manager and Senior Analyst for a national consumer packaged goods firm. He also has extensive professional experience in retail banking and recently completed a three-year term as Vice Chairman of the board of directors for a regional credit union.
Miguel Palacios
Assistant Professor of Finance
Miguel Palacios’ primary research interests are in the areas of asset pricing and labor economics, particularly as they relate to human capital. He joined Owen after completing his Ph.D. in finance at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as a Graduate Instructor for several finance courses and received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Dean Witter Fellowship and the Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award.
He is the author of Investing in Human Capital: A Capital Market’s Approach to Student Funding (Cambridge University Press) and co-author of the monograph Investing in Emerging Markets (Research Foundation of AIMR).
Palacios has presented at conferences at universities and private and government organizations such as the World Bank, International Finance Corporation, University of Virginia, Libertad y Desarollo (Santiago, Chile) and the Korean Education Ministry. He has also served as a Referee for The Economic Journal and Management Science.
In 2001 Palacios co-founded Lumni Inc., which structures and manages innovative investment vehicles for financing education in which students agree to pay a percentage of their future income in exchange for financing of their education costs. He has also worked as a Summer Associate at ValuePartners LLC and an Economic Studies Analyst at Sigma S.A. He began his academic career by teaching physics at Colegio Los Nogales in Bogotá, Colombia.
Palacios is an instrument-rated pilot and has been a member of Colombia’s water-skiing team. He recently ranked third (2006) and fourth (2008) on the West Coast in Men’s II Trick Water Skiing.
Mark Ratchford
Assistant Professor of Marketing
Mark Ratchford is an expert in consumer behavior and game-theory-based models of marketing strategy. He joined Owen after completing his Ph.D. in marketing at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, where he taught marketing research and consumer behavior and was awarded the Gerald Hart Research Fellowship and the University Fellowship.
His primary research interests include the impact of social networks on coalitions among firms, perceptions of firm fairness and the optimal strategic marketing mix for branded input products. He has also conducted behavioral research on the impact of goal setting and self-regulatory resource depletion of subsequent task performance.
Ratchford has presented his work at several major conferences, including the Association for Consumer Research Conference and INFORMS Marketing Science Conference. In 2006 he was an invited speaker at the Robert Mittelstaedt Marketing Doctoral Symposium in Lincoln, Neb., and was honored with the Best Paper Award at the American Marketing Association Winter Educators Conference. He is an AMA-Sheth Doctoral Consortium Fellow and serves as a Conference Referee for the Association for Consumer Research.
Earlier in his career Ratchford held analyst roles for ATX Telecommunications, Boat America Corporation, Teligent Inc. and PacifiCorp. He also served as Director of Industry Affairs for the Wireless Communications Association International in Washington, D.C.
Ratchford is affiliated with several other professional organizations, including the American Marketing Association, Association for Consumer Research, Society for Consumer Psychology and INFORMS, and is a member of the professional business fraternity Alpha Kappa Psi.