Literature Positioning (mksc-literature-positioning)

When to trigger

• The intro reads as "no one has modeled X" (gap-spotting) rather than joining a modeling conversation
• You are unsure which precedent papers define your model's baseline
• Reviewers may say "this is a small extension of an existing model"
• You build on your own prior work and must disclose how this paper goes beyond it

Position on two axes at once

A Marketing Science paper sits at the intersection of a modeling lineage and a substantive stream. Make both explicit.

1. Modeling lineage. Which model is your baseline — a BLP-style demand system, a dynamic discrete-choice model, a channel/Stackelberg pricing game, an auction or search model? State what you add to it (a new mechanism, richer dynamics, a novel identification strategy, a tractable closed form) and why prior models could not answer your question.
2. Substantive stream. Which marketing problem — pricing, advertising/digital and attribution, branding, distribution channels and retailing, platforms/two-sided markets, or marketing analytics/ML — does the paper speak to? Tie the model's payoff to that stream's open questions.

From gap-spotting to a real contribution

Do not justify the paper by absence ("X has not been studied"). Justify it by what the field gains: a sharper mechanism, a counterfactual prior models could not compute, a relaxed assumption that overturns a known result, or a method others can reuse. The strongest framings show that a natural prior modeling choice gives the wrong answer, and your model corrects it.