Consumer Fraud and Product Liability

Pinar Yildirim

Associate Professor of Marketing,
The Wharton School,
Associate Professor of Economics,
University of Pennsylvania;
Senior Fellow, Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition,
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Pinar Yildirim is a quantitative marketing and economics expert specializing in media, technology, and information economics. Combining applied theory and empirical analysis, Professor Yildirim studies online platforms, artificial intelligence (AI), privacy, digitization, and social networks. The American Marketing Association (AMA) honored her in 2020 with the Erin Anderson Award, which recognizes a female marketing scholar likely to become a leading academic in the field.

In her research, Professor Yildirim analyzes such topics as advertising and competitive product positioning, the role of choice in two-sided platforms, and the incentive of platforms to moderate content. Professor Yildirim also studies social network design, the impact of advertising on media content, and the use of social network data in credit scoring. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) noted her work on social media and political contributions in 2021 proposed rulemaking involving political programming.

Professor Yildirim’s research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the American Economic Review, Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing Research, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and Management Science. She also serves on the editorial boards of Marketing Science and the Journal of Marketing Research. Numerous mainstream media outlets have covered her work, including CNN, Forbes, the New York Times, NPR, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

At Wharton, Professor Yildirim has received awards for teaching excellence. She teaches undergraduate and M.B.A. courses in marketing research and marketing strategy for technology platforms and executive education modules focused on digital marketing, business in the metaverse economy, and marketing for financial firms.

Professor Yildirim is also a Faculty Research Fellow in the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Katja Seim

Sharon Oster Professor of Economics and Management,
Yale School of Management,
Yale University

Katja Seim specializes in topics related to industrial organization, regulation, and antitrust. Professor Seim served as the chief economist at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2016 to 2017. She is a member of the Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy (EAGCP) at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition (DG COMP).

In her current research, Professor Seim studies the role of consumer inattention in firm pricing and competition in online markets. She analyzes how firms make product introduction, market entry, and pricing decisions in response to public policies involving subsidization, entry and technology deployment regulations, competition, and tax.

Professor Seim’s work also evaluates how market power affects government efforts to efficiently procure goods and services and sell assets. She has substantial expertise in the economics of price setting, including price discrimination and nonlinear pricing, particularly in the context of communications and information industries.

Professor Seim’s work has appeared in leading academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Marketing Science, and the RAND Journal of Economics. She is a coeditor of the American Economic Review, and formerly coedited the RAND Journal of Economics.

Professor Seim is a research fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). She is a nonresident fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution.

At Yale, Professor Seim teaches courses on industrial organization, probability modeling and statistics, and regulation. She previously served on the faculties of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Wayne D. Hoyer

Professor of Marketing,
James L. Bayless/William S. Farish Fund Chair for Free Enterprise,
McCombs School of Business,
University of Texas at Austin

Wayne Hoyer is an expert in consumer behavior, survey methodology, advertising, and branding. Professor Hoyer’s research focuses on understanding how consumers acquire and process information and how this information affects their purchase decisions and behavior.

Professor Hoyer has provided expert testimony at trial and deposition and submitted expert reports. He has addressed consumer perception and consumer behavior issues in Lanham Act cases and consumer class action matters involving false advertising and product liability claims. Professor Hoyer has conducted and rebutted consumer surveys in these settings. He has also performed content analysis of product manufacturers’ marketing communications.

Professor Hoyer has published more than one hundred articles in leading peer-reviewed marketing and psychology journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of Marketing. Many of these studies involve the use of survey methodology. Professor Hoyer is the coauthor of the textbook Consumer Behavior, now in its seventh edition, as well as eight other books. He was associate editor of the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing, and the International Journal of Research in Marketing. He has also served on the editorial review boards of numerous academic journals in the fields of marketing and consumer behavior.

Among Professor Hoyer’s honors are the Career Award for Outstanding Research Contributions from the McCombs School of Business; the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn, Germany; and an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern, Switzerland.

At the University of Texas at Austin, Professor Hoyer has taught courses to undergraduate and graduate students on such topics as consumer behavior, customer strategy, and integrated marketing communications. He has received several teaching awards, including the American Marketing Association’s Outstanding Marketing Professor. Professor Hoyer has also taught internationally at leading universities in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Thailand.