About

Kinshuk Jerath is a professor at Columbia Business School, Columbia University, where he holds the position of Chair of the Marketing Division since July 2022. He is the Arthur F. Burns Professor of Free and Competitive Enterprise and has been a Professor of Marketing since July 2020. Prior to this, he served as the Class of 1967 Associate Professor of Business from January 2015 to June 2016 and as Associate Professor of Marketing from July 2013 to June 2020, with tenure effective July 2016. He is also an Advisor for the Media and Technology Program since September 2016. Before joining Columbia, Jerath was an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, from July 2008 to May 2013, and served as Faculty Giving Chair from July 2010 to June 2011. Jerath earned his Ph.D. in Operations and Information Management from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, in 2008. He also holds a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, completed in 2003. His expertise lies in technology-enabled marketing, digital advertising, online and offline platforms and marketplaces, customer analytics, sales management, and Salesforce compensation. He focuses on the interface of marketing with operations management. In addition to his academic roles, Jerath serves as an advisor to several organizations including Smartkarma Intelligent Investing since 2014, Analytical Wizards since 2015, and OnRiva since 2016.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Marketing
• Political Science
• Advertising
• Microeconomics
• Economics
• Internet privacy
• World Wide Web
• Cognitive psychology
• Psychology
• Finance

Selected publications

• Seller-Side Tying of Platform Services

  Toulouse Capitole Publications (University Toulouse 1 Capitole) · 2026-04-01

  other

  National audience

  Publisher

• Inclusive Product Design as a Signal of Capability

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Dual Monetization on Creator Platforms: The Interplay Between Advertising Revenue and Brand Sponsorship

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Nonlinear Impact of Promised Delivery Time on Online Purchasing

  Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2025-09-24 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Problem definition: For e-commerce companies to assess how best to invest in improving delivery times, it is important to understand how improving delivery times affects customer demand. In collaboration with a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce company, we study how the promised delivery time in a quote affects the customer’s purchase probability. Methodology/results: We use observational and experimental data from our partner with quote-level variation in promised delivery times. This allows us to estimate demand as a function of promised delivery time after flexibly controlling for customer, product, and vendor differences. We find that there is a large, robust effect of promised delivery time on demand: a one-day improvement in promised delivery time increases demand by 1.82%, equivalent to a 2.21% discount, comparable to prior findings in business-to-consumer retail contexts. Interestingly, using semiparametric analysis, we find that this effect is nonlinear: demand is not sensitive to promised delivery times of under a week but drops quickly when delivery is expected to take more than a week. Managerial implications: We find that timely delivery is important in a B2B setting, not just in fast-moving retail settings. We show that the largest improvements in demand are to be gained from investing in measures that can reduce the long tail of slow deliveries (e.g., avoiding stockouts and processing delays, ensuring geographic coverage of fulfillment centers) rather than reducing the delivery time of products that are already relatively fast to deliver. The results from our analysis were used by our partner to decide on opening new fulfillment centers and repricing their services given the new fulfillment center network (because customers are willing to pay more for faster delivery). History: This paper has been accepted as part of the 2025 Manufacturing & Service Operations Management Practice-Based Research Competition. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2024.1335 .

  PublisherDOI

• Digital Twins as Funhouse Mirrors: Five Key Distortions

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2025-09-23

  preprintOpen access

  Scientists and practitioners are increasingly moving to deploy digital twins--LLM-based models of real individuals--across social science and policy research. We conduct 19 pre-registered studies spanning 164 diverse outcomes (e.g., attitudes toward hiring algorithms, intentions to share misinformation), comparing human responses to those of their corresponding digital twins, which are trained on each individual's prior responses to over 500 questions. We establish an empirical benchmark for digital twin performance: their predictions are only modestly more accurate than those of a homogeneous base LLM and exhibit weak correlation with human responses (average $r = 0.20$). To inform future development, we identify five systematic distortions in digital twin behavior: (i) insufficient individuation, (ii) stereotyping, (iii) representation bias, (iv) ideological bias, and (v) hyper-rationality. Finally, we release our full dataset and code as a standardized testbed for evaluating and improving digital twin methodologies. Together, our findings caution against premature deployment while laying the groundwork for a transparent, replicable, and iterative science of responsible digital twin development.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dual Monetization on Creator Platforms: The Interplay Between Advertising Revenue and Brand Sponsorship

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Non-Linear Impact of Delivery Time on Online Purchasing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Impact of “Retail Media” on Online Marketplaces: Insights from a Field Experiment

  Information Systems Research · 2024-05-15 · 9 citations

  article

  A part of retail media wherein sponsored product listings are interleaved with organic product listings in the search results is a large and growing phenomenon. In this paper, we study the impact of displaying sponsored listings at top positions for the platform. Analyzing data from a large-scale field experiment at a leading online marketplace in India, we find nuanced results that substantially vary across product categories. In the electronics category, the sponsored listings receive fewer clicks than the organic listings that they replace. Surprisingly, this effect is reversed in the clothing category, in which the ads perform better than the displaced organic listings, suggesting that sponsored listings might help the platform identify new high-relevance products and improve search rankings for these categories. At the search level, we find that increasing the fraction of sponsored listings (by about 10% points) in the search results does not affect the performance in any product category. This implies that ads bring in additional revenue for the marketplace yet do not hurt overall consumer response (in the short run). We theorize that the variation across categories occurs because of differing degrees of information asymmetry on product relevance between the marketplace and the sellers.

  PublisherDOI

• Consumer Search and Product Returns

  Marketing Science · 2024-11-25 · 20 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper analyzes consumer prepurchase search and its impact on consumer behavior and firm pricing and return policies.

  PublisherDOI

• Comment on “Salesforce Compensation with Inventory Considerations”: A Rejoinder

  Management Science · 2024-10-28

  articleSenior author

  In this rejoinder, we address the concern about equilibrium existence in our previous work published in 2013. By making the simple adjustment of discretizing inventory ordering amounts to prevent inventory orders in arbitrarily small increments, we show that the results from that paper hold, thus maintaining the robustness of the insights obtained. This paper was accepted by Jeannette Song, operations management.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Tinglong Dai

  Johns Hopkins University

  10 shared

• Z. John Zhang

  Inner Mongolia Electric Power (China)

  10 shared

• Peter S. Fader

  8 shared

• Amin Sayedi

  University of Washington

  8 shared

• W. Jason Choi

  University of Maryland, College Park

  7 shared

• Miklós Sárváry

  Columbia University

  6 shared

• Fei Long

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  6 shared

• Bruce G. S. Hardie

  6 shared