The job market for assistant professors in marketing

That's the title of a new paper by César Zamudio, Yu Wang, and Ernan Haruvy, which looks at the market for marketers as a two sided matching problem.

Here's the abstract:
"We measure the value of different types of matches between job candidates and marketing departments by applying a structural two-sided matching model to a dataset of placements in the entry-level marketing professor job market in 1997 – 2005. Our results show that a match between a candidate trained in a particular field and a department with comparable faculty is not always the most valuable match. We find evidence for publications serving as quality signals for job candidates, especially publications in top marketing journals. Author positions close to the first and a large number of co-authors seem to be valuable signals of job candidates’ research productivity. Finally, matches between candidates who graduated from top ranked departments and top ranked hiring departments generate especially high matching values."

They write about the somewhat complicated unraveling they see in the market:
"The expertise structure of the marketing arena has caused the hiring process within each field to unravel differently. This is a consequence of the way research productivity is judged by marketing faculty from different fields. As of today, most candidates have defended their dissertation proposals by the time they participate in the market. CB [consumer behavior] and strategy job candidates are often expected to have multiple finished projects in their research pipeline, preferably submitted to top journals, by the time they participate in the market. This expectation requires that the candidate be involved in projects which are in advanced planning stages, and pursue active collaborations with senior faculty members. Modeling candidates, however, are only expected to have constructed a plan for their dissertation, along with preliminary results. This is because modeling articles often have a longer time to submission and the review process is considerably slower. Thus, modeling departments hire based on the promise of each candidate’s research proposal. To summarize, depending on the candidate’s field, he or she may be evaluated based on a promise of a planned project, or based on a rich portfolio of finished projects in which the candidate’s relative contribution is unknown.