Nikhil Malik
Economic Foundations of AI

PhD Seminar · Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University

Part I — Application and Methods
AI Application in Empirical Research
Timoshenko & Hauser, Marketing Science 2019 · Puranam, Kadiyali & Narayan, Marketing Science 2021 · Troncoso & Luo, Marketing Science 2022
Econometric Challenges when Using AI Hands-On Exercise →
Chen, Hong & Tamer, Review of Economic Studies 2005 · Yang, Adomavicius & Burtch, ISR 2018 · Qiao & Huang, ISR 2021
AI Methods for Business Applications
Liu, Marketing Science 2023 · Wang, Tao & Zhang, Marketing Science 2025 · Ye, Yoganarasimhan & Zheng, Marketing Science 2025
Part II — Agentic AI
Design “Consumer” Agents for Synthetic Market Research Hands-On Exercise →
1000 Agents / GenAgents (GitHub)
Design “Platform” Agent (RAG+LLM) for Shopping Hands-On Exercise →
OpenAI SDK · UC Berkeley Agentic AI Course · WebShop
Dukes & Liu, Management Science 2015 · Hagiu & Wright, Management Science 2024
Design “Brand” Agent (Workflow) for Pricing and Advertising Hands-On Exercise →
LangChain · Flowise
Iyer, Soberman & Villas-Boas, Marketing Science 2005
Acknowledgments
Pushpendre Rastogi VizOps, ex-Google DeepMind · Agentic AI
Yuyan Wang Stanford · AI and Marketing methodology
Behnam Mohammadi UT Dallas · Synthetic market research
Kathleen Li UT Austin · Econometrics
Emaad Manzoor Cornell · Human-AI literature
Liying Qiu CMU · Course TA, exercise design