Faculty and Research

Alvin J. Silk is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. He served as co-chairman of the Marketing Unit and initiated a course in "Brand Marketing" offered in the second year of the MBA program. He also taught a doctoral seminar in 'Research Design and Measurement.'

Silk has been at the Harvard Business School since 1989. From 1968-88 he was a member of the faculty at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was Erwin Schell Professor of Management and served as Deputy Dean from 1981-87. He was a Visiting Research Associate at the Marketing Science Institute and a Ford Foundation Visiting Professor at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, Brussels.

Silk's current research is concerned with the economics of the advertising industry. His work in this area includes econometric studies (with E. Berndt) of the effects of scale and scope on advertising agency costs and intermedia competition in the U.S. national advertising market. His most recent papers (with C. King, Jr., and N. Kettelhohn) investigate changes over time in the geographical distribution and concentration level of the U.S.advertising agency industry and holding company cost economies in the global advertising and marketing services business (with E. Berndt).

His earlier work had focused on developing model and measurement systems to support decisions in the areas of new product development and marketing communications. With Glen Urban, he developed the ASSESSOR pre-test marketing system for evaluation of new packaged goods which received the 1983 William O'Dell Award for the most significant article published by the Journal of Marketing Research in 1978. The ASSESSOR system also received a 1983 Management Science Achievement Finalist Award from the Institute of Management Sciences which Professor Silk shared with Glen Urban, Gerald Katz and Thomas Hatch (Interfaces, December 1982). Another of th e works he co-authored ('The Development and Testing of a New Marketing Strategy for AT&T Long Lines,' Interfaces, December, 1982, with A. Kuritsky, J. Little, and E. Bassman) also received a TIMS Management Science Achievement Finalist Awar. In 2001, the Marketing Science Institute appointed him "Distinguished Research Accociate."

Professor Silk is a director of Reed and Barton, Corp.and is a member of the Dean's Inernational Advisory Board, H.E.C., Jouy-en-Josas, France. He is Director of the Marketing Research Network and co-editor of the Quantitative Marketing Abstracts Journal, both of which are part of the Social Science Research Network (www.ssrn.com). He also serves as a member of the Marketing Science Insitute's research review committee.

Professor Silk's CV