Topic Selection & Venue Fit (mksc-topic-selection)

When to trigger

• You have a marketing phenomenon (pricing, advertising/digital, branding, channels/retail, platforms, analytics) but no modeling angle
• You are unsure whether the question is "important" by Marketing Science standards
• You have a finding but it is a reduced-form correlation with no model
• You cannot decide between Marketing Science, JCR, JMR, or Management Science

The two-part fit test

Marketing Science publishes "articles that answer important research questions in marketing using mathematical modeling." A topic must pass both gates:

1. Substantive importance. A real marketing decision or market phenomenon — how firms price, advertise, design assortments, or how consumers and markets respond — that managers or the field care about.
2. Modelability. It can be framed as an analytical (game-theoretic) model of strategic interaction, OR a structural econometric model of demand/supply that is estimable and yields counterfactuals. If neither fits, MKSC is likely the wrong venue.

A strong MKSC topic usually implies a counterfactual or policy question — "what happens to prices, share, or welfare if the firm/platform changes X?" — that only a model can answer.

Pick the genre the question implies