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Doug J. Chung

Doug J. Chung

MBA Class of 1962 Associate Professor of Business Administration

MBA Class of 1962 Associate Professor of Business Administration

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Doug J. Chung is the MBA Class of 1962 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He teaches Sales Management & Strategy in the second year MBA Elective Curriculum. He also chairs the Executive Education program, Managing Sales Teams and Distribution Channels. He has previously taught B2B Marketing in the MBA Elective Curriculum, the core Marketing course in the first year MBA Required Curriculum, Marketing Models in the PhD Curriculum, and in various Executive Education programs at the Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School.

Professor Chung focuses his research primarily on sales strategy, sales force management and incentive compensation. He has worked with firms worldwide to develop effective employee incentive compensation systems and his work has been published in Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and the Harvard Business Review. His current work examines how specific elements of an incentive compensation system affect the performance and selection of varying types of sales employees.

Professor Chung earned his Ph.D. in management at Yale University, where he also earned an M.A. and M.Phil. in management. He was the finalist for the 2014 John D. C. Little Award, the 2015 Frank M. Bass Award, and the 2020 Gary L. Lilien Practice Prize. He was selected as a 2017 MSI Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute. Professor Chung serves on the editorial board at major academic journals, including Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and the International Journal of Research in Marketing. He currently serves as a Senior Advisor for McKinsey & Company’s sales and marketing practices. He completed his undergraduate studies at Korea University. Prior to pursuing a career in academics, Professor Chung served as a platoon commander in the South Korean Special Warfare Command.

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Featured Work Publications Research Summary Teaching Awards & Honors
The Comprehensive Effects of Sales Force Management: A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Selection, Compensation, and Training
This study provides a comprehensive model of an agent’s behavior in response to multiple sales management instruments, including compensation, recruiting/termination, and training. The model takes into account many of the key elements that constitute a realistic sales force setting—allocation of effort; forward-looking behavior; present bias; training effectiveness; and employee selection and attrition. By understanding how these elements jointly influence agents’ behavior, the study provides guidance on the optimal design of sales management policies. A field validation, by comparing counterfactual and actual outcomes under a new policy, attests the accuracy of the model. The results demonstrate a trade-off between adjusting fixed and variable pay; how sales training serve as an alternative to compensation; a potential drawback of hiring high-performing experienced salespeople; and how utilizing a leave package leads to sales force restructuring. In addition, the study offers a key methodological contribution by providing formal identification conditions for hyperbolic time preferences. The key to identification is that, under a multi-period nonlinear incentive system, an agent’s proximity to a goal affects only future payoffs in non-pecuniary benefit periods, providing exclusion restrictions on the current payoff. 
 
The Air War Versus The Ground Game: An Analysis of Multi-Channel Marketing in U.S. Presidential Elections
This study jointly examines the effects of television advertising and field operations in U.S. presidential elections, with the former referred to as the “air war” and the latter as the “ground game.” Specifically, the study focuses on how different campaign activities—personal selling in the form of field operations and mass media advertising by the candidate and outside sources—vary in their effectiveness with voters who have different political predispositions. The voting choice model takes into consideration voter heterogeneity and analyzes comprehensive data that include voting outcomes, detailed campaign activities, and voters’ party affiliation for three presidential elections (2004-2012). The results reveal that different campaign activities have heterogeneous effects depending on voters’ party affiliation. Field operations and political advertising from outside groups are more effective with partisans, while a candidate’s advertising is more effective with non-partisans. These findings can help strategists better allocate resources across and within channels to design an effective political marketing campaign.
A Practical Approach to Sales Compensation: What Do We Know Now? What Should We Know in the Future?
Personal selling represents one of the most important elements in the marketing mix, and appropriate management of the sales force is vital to achieving the organization’s objectives. Among the various instruments of sales management, compensation plays a pivotal role in motivating and incentivizing sales agents. This monograph reviews the evolution of research in sales compensation and discusses future trends and opportunities. Specifically, it examines the managerial relevance of the theoretical foundations, discussing the underlying reasons for their applicability (or lack thereof) in practice. Furthermore, the monograph surveys recent empirical methods—including field experiments and structural econometrics—that are practical for analyzing sales agents’ behavior under various compensation systems. It also discusses prominent areas of future research in the midst of a changing sales environment. In particular, this monograph sheds light on how the use of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence can affect sales strategy formulation and, thus, sales compensation systems to better motivate and incentivize an organization’s sales force.
The Effects of Quota Frequency: Sales Performance and Product Focus
This study investigates the comprehensive and multidimensional effects of quota (goal) frequency on sales force performance. The study provides a theory of salespeople’s behavior—aggregate effort and the product type focus—in response to the temporal length of a sales-quota cycle. The theory includes many realistic elements, such as salespeople’s multi-dimensional effort, heterogeneity in ability, product focus, and forward-looking behavior. We test the theory through a field experiment, varying the sales compensation structure of a major retail chain in Sweden. Consistent with the developed theory, shifting to a temporally frequent quota structure leads to an increase in sales performance for low-performing salespeople by preventing them from giving up in later periods within a quota-evaluation cycle, but to a decrease in sales performance for high-performing salespeople. With quotas set over short time horizons, the high-performing salespeople focus mainly on low-ticket products, resulting in a decrease in both sales volume and the sale of high-ticket products, thus reducing the firm’s profits.
Price Bargaining and Competition in Online Platforms: An Empirical Analysis of the Daily Deal Market
The prevalence of online platforms opens new doors to traditional businesses for customer reach and revenue growth. This research investigates platform competition in a setting where prices are determined by negotiations between platforms and businesses. We compile a unique and comprehensive data set from the U.S. daily deal market, where merchants offer deals to generate revenues and attract new customers. We specify and estimate a two-stage supply-side model in which platforms and merchants bargain on the wholesale price of deals. Based on Nash bargaining solutions, our model generates insights on how bargaining power and bargaining position jointly determine price and firm profits. By working with a bigger platform, merchants enjoy a larger customer base but they are subject to lower margins due to less bargaining power during negotiation. Counterfactual results reveal that, in the absence of platform competition merchants are worse off due to their weaker bargaining position but consumers experience lower prices, leading to an increase in total demand.  
How Do Sales Efforts Pay Off? Dynamic Panel Data Analysis in the Nerlove-Arrow Framework
This paper evaluates the short- and long-term value of sales representatives’ detailing visits to different types of physicians. By understanding the dynamic effect of sales calls across heterogeneous physicians, we provide guidance on the design of optimal call patterns for route sales. The findings reveal that the long-term persistence effect of detailing is more pronounced for specialist physicians, whereas the contemporaneous marginal effect is higher for generalists. The paper also provides a key methodological insight to the marketing and economics literature. In the Nerlove-Arrow framework, moment conditions that are typically used in conventional dynamic panel data methods become vulnerable to serial correlation in the error structure. We discuss the associated biases and present a robust set of moment conditions for both lagged dependent and predetermined explanatory variables. Furthermore, we show that conventional tests to detect serial correlation have weak power, resulting in the misuse of moment conditions that leads to incorrect inference. Theoretical illustrations and Monte Carlo simulations are provided for validation
Incentives versus Reciprocity: Insights from a Field Experiment

We conduct a field experiment in which we vary the sales force compensation scheme at an Asian enterprise that sells consumer durable goods. With variation generated by the experimental treatments, we model sales force performance to identify the effectiveness of various forms of conditional and unconditional compensation. We account for salesperson heterogeneity by using a hierarchical Bayesian framework to estimate our model. We find conditional compensation in the form of quota-bonus incentives to improve performance; however, it may lead to lower future performance. We find little evidence that effectiveness differs between a quota-bonus plan and a punitive-bonus plan framed as a penalty for not achieving quota. We find unconditional compensation in the form of reciprocity to be effective at improving sales force performance only when given as a delayed reward of which the effectiveness decreases with repeated exposure. We also find heterogeneity in the impact of compensation on performance across salespeople; unconditional compensation is more effective for salespeople with high base performance, whereas conditional compensation is equally effective across all types of salespeople.

How Much Is a Win Worth? An Application to Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletics in the United States have become a multibillion-dollar industry over the past several decades. In this study, we investigate the short- and long-term direct monetary effects of operating a winning athletics program for an academic institution of higher education. We construct a unique panel dataset from multiple sources and utilize the latest dynamic panel data estimation methods to account for heterogeneity while also addressing endogeneity concerns. We find that success in men’s football and basketball has a significant impact on a school’s respective football and basketball revenues; however, the effect is different based on the type of school. We find that regular season wins in football account for most of the increase in revenue for established schools whereas invitations to prestigious postseason bowl games play a big part for less-established schools. Furthermore, we find that student population and education quality dissipate the effect of athletic success on monetary payoffs. We find that success in basketball carries over more from the past than in football with additional contemporaneous marginal effects for established schools. We do find, however, that past athletic success carries over significantly to the present in both football and basketball, suggesting the significance of the long-term monetary effect of athletic success to many academic institutions in the United States.
How to Really Motivate Salespeople
Much of what we believe about the best ways to compensate and motivate the sales force is based on theory and lab experiments. But in the past decade, researchers have been moving out of the lab and into the field, analyzing companies' sales and pay data, and conducting experiments involving actual salespeople. The findings from this new wave of research support some current compensation practices but call others into question. For example, studies clearly show that caps on commissions hurt sales. If managers must retain a cap, they should set it as high as possible to avoid reducing reps' incentives. Although overly complicated compensation systems have their downsides, research has found that a system needs to include enough elements (such as quarterly performance and overachievement bonuses) to keep high performers, low performers, and average performers engaged throughout the year. Managers should be careful in setting and adjusting quotas. For instance, studies show that ratcheting (raising a salesperson's annual quota if he or she exceeded it the previous year) dampens motivation. The research also suggests that it's important to pay attention to the timing of bonuses: a reward given at the end of a period is more motivating than one given at the beginning.
Motivating Diverse Salespeople Through a Common Incentive Plan
For practical reasons, many companies offer a common incentive plan to an entire sales force rather than offering customised plans for each individual. Doug J. Chung, Thomas Steenburgh, and K. Sudhir address how companies can design a single plan that motivates everyone to work to the best of their abilities.
The Dynamic Advertising Effect of Collegiate Athletics

I measure the spillover effect of intercollegiate athletics on the quantity and quality of applicants to institutions of higher education in the United States, popularly known as the "Flutie Effect." I treat athletic success as a stock of goodwill that decays over time, similar to that of advertising. Overall, athletic success has a significant long-term goodwill effect on future applications and quality. However, students with lower than average SAT scores tend to have a stronger preference for athletic success, while students with higher SAT scores have a greater preference for academic quality.

Do Bonuses Enhance Sales Productivity? A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Bonus-Based Compensation Plans
We estimate a dynamic structural model of sales force response to a bonus based compensation plan. Substantively, the paper sheds insights on how different elements of the compensation plan enhance productivity. We find evidence that: (1) bonuses enhance productivity across all segments; (2) overachievement commissions help sustain the high productivity of the best performers even after attaining quotas; and (3) quarterly bonuses help improve performance of the weak performers by serving as pacers to keep the sales force on track to achieve their annual sales quotas. The paper also introduces two main methodological innovations to the marketing literature: First, we implement empirically the method proposed by Arcidiacono and Miller (2011) to accommodate unobserved latent class heterogeneity using a computationally light two-step estimator. Second, we illustrate how discount factors can be estimated in a dynamic structural model using field data through a combination of (1) an exclusion restriction separating current and future payoff and (2) a finite horizon model in which there is no forward looking behavior in the last period.

Doug J. Chung is the MBA Class of 1962 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He teaches Sales Management & Strategy in the second year MBA Elective Curriculum. He also chairs the Executive Education program, Managing Sales Teams and Distribution Channels. He has previously taught B2B Marketing in the MBA Elective Curriculum, the core Marketing course in the first year MBA Required Curriculum, Marketing Models in the PhD Curriculum, and in various Executive Education programs at the Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School.

Professor Chung focuses his research primarily on sales strategy, sales force management and incentive compensation. He has worked with firms worldwide to develop effective employee incentive compensation systems and his work has been published in Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and the Harvard Business Review. His current work examines how specific elements of an incentive compensation system affect the performance and selection of varying types of sales employees.

Professor Chung earned his Ph.D. in management at Yale University, where he also earned an M.A. and M.Phil. in management. He was the finalist for the 2014 John D. C. Little Award, the 2015 Frank M. Bass Award, and the 2020 Gary L. Lilien Practice Prize. He was selected as a 2017 MSI Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute. Professor Chung serves on the editorial board at major academic journals, including Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and the International Journal of Research in Marketing. He currently serves as a Senior Advisor for McKinsey & Company’s sales and marketing practices. He completed his undergraduate studies at Korea University. Prior to pursuing a career in academics, Professor Chung served as a platoon commander in the South Korean Special Warfare Command.

Featured Work
The Comprehensive Effects of Sales Force Management: A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Selection, Compensation, and Training
This study provides a comprehensive model of an agent’s behavior in response to multiple sales management instruments, including compensation, recruiting/termination, and training. The model takes into account many of the key elements that constitute a realistic sales force setting—allocation of effort; forward-looking behavior; present bias; training effectiveness; and employee selection and attrition. By understanding how these elements jointly influence agents’ behavior, the study provides guidance on the optimal design of sales management policies. A field validation, by comparing counterfactual and actual outcomes under a new policy, attests the accuracy of the model. The results demonstrate a trade-off between adjusting fixed and variable pay; how sales training serve as an alternative to compensation; a potential drawback of hiring high-performing experienced salespeople; and how utilizing a leave package leads to sales force restructuring. In addition, the study offers a key methodological contribution by providing formal identification conditions for hyperbolic time preferences. The key to identification is that, under a multi-period nonlinear incentive system, an agent’s proximity to a goal affects only future payoffs in non-pecuniary benefit periods, providing exclusion restrictions on the current payoff. 
 
The Air War Versus The Ground Game: An Analysis of Multi-Channel Marketing in U.S. Presidential Elections
This study jointly examines the effects of television advertising and field operations in U.S. presidential elections, with the former referred to as the “air war” and the latter as the “ground game.” Specifically, the study focuses on how different campaign activities—personal selling in the form of field operations and mass media advertising by the candidate and outside sources—vary in their effectiveness with voters who have different political predispositions. The voting choice model takes into consideration voter heterogeneity and analyzes comprehensive data that include voting outcomes, detailed campaign activities, and voters’ party affiliation for three presidential elections (2004-2012). The results reveal that different campaign activities have heterogeneous effects depending on voters’ party affiliation. Field operations and political advertising from outside groups are more effective with partisans, while a candidate’s advertising is more effective with non-partisans. These findings can help strategists better allocate resources across and within channels to design an effective political marketing campaign.
A Practical Approach to Sales Compensation: What Do We Know Now? What Should We Know in the Future?
Personal selling represents one of the most important elements in the marketing mix, and appropriate management of the sales force is vital to achieving the organization’s objectives. Among the various instruments of sales management, compensation plays a pivotal role in motivating and incentivizing sales agents. This monograph reviews the evolution of research in sales compensation and discusses future trends and opportunities. Specifically, it examines the managerial relevance of the theoretical foundations, discussing the underlying reasons for their applicability (or lack thereof) in practice. Furthermore, the monograph surveys recent empirical methods—including field experiments and structural econometrics—that are practical for analyzing sales agents’ behavior under various compensation systems. It also discusses prominent areas of future research in the midst of a changing sales environment. In particular, this monograph sheds light on how the use of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence can affect sales strategy formulation and, thus, sales compensation systems to better motivate and incentivize an organization’s sales force.
The Effects of Quota Frequency: Sales Performance and Product Focus
This study investigates the comprehensive and multidimensional effects of quota (goal) frequency on sales force performance. The study provides a theory of salespeople’s behavior—aggregate effort and the product type focus—in response to the temporal length of a sales-quota cycle. The theory includes many realistic elements, such as salespeople’s multi-dimensional effort, heterogeneity in ability, product focus, and forward-looking behavior. We test the theory through a field experiment, varying the sales compensation structure of a major retail chain in Sweden. Consistent with the developed theory, shifting to a temporally frequent quota structure leads to an increase in sales performance for low-performing salespeople by preventing them from giving up in later periods within a quota-evaluation cycle, but to a decrease in sales performance for high-performing salespeople. With quotas set over short time horizons, the high-performing salespeople focus mainly on low-ticket products, resulting in a decrease in both sales volume and the sale of high-ticket products, thus reducing the firm’s profits.
Price Bargaining and Competition in Online Platforms: An Empirical Analysis of the Daily Deal Market
The prevalence of online platforms opens new doors to traditional businesses for customer reach and revenue growth. This research investigates platform competition in a setting where prices are determined by negotiations between platforms and businesses. We compile a unique and comprehensive data set from the U.S. daily deal market, where merchants offer deals to generate revenues and attract new customers. We specify and estimate a two-stage supply-side model in which platforms and merchants bargain on the wholesale price of deals. Based on Nash bargaining solutions, our model generates insights on how bargaining power and bargaining position jointly determine price and firm profits. By working with a bigger platform, merchants enjoy a larger customer base but they are subject to lower margins due to less bargaining power during negotiation. Counterfactual results reveal that, in the absence of platform competition merchants are worse off due to their weaker bargaining position but consumers experience lower prices, leading to an increase in total demand.  
How Do Sales Efforts Pay Off? Dynamic Panel Data Analysis in the Nerlove-Arrow Framework
This paper evaluates the short- and long-term value of sales representatives’ detailing visits to different types of physicians. By understanding the dynamic effect of sales calls across heterogeneous physicians, we provide guidance on the design of optimal call patterns for route sales. The findings reveal that the long-term persistence effect of detailing is more pronounced for specialist physicians, whereas the contemporaneous marginal effect is higher for generalists. The paper also provides a key methodological insight to the marketing and economics literature. In the Nerlove-Arrow framework, moment conditions that are typically used in conventional dynamic panel data methods become vulnerable to serial correlation in the error structure. We discuss the associated biases and present a robust set of moment conditions for both lagged dependent and predetermined explanatory variables. Furthermore, we show that conventional tests to detect serial correlation have weak power, resulting in the misuse of moment conditions that leads to incorrect inference. Theoretical illustrations and Monte Carlo simulations are provided for validation
Incentives versus Reciprocity: Insights from a Field Experiment

We conduct a field experiment in which we vary the sales force compensation scheme at an Asian enterprise that sells consumer durable goods. With variation generated by the experimental treatments, we model sales force performance to identify the effectiveness of various forms of conditional and unconditional compensation. We account for salesperson heterogeneity by using a hierarchical Bayesian framework to estimate our model. We find conditional compensation in the form of quota-bonus incentives to improve performance; however, it may lead to lower future performance. We find little evidence that effectiveness differs between a quota-bonus plan and a punitive-bonus plan framed as a penalty for not achieving quota. We find unconditional compensation in the form of reciprocity to be effective at improving sales force performance only when given as a delayed reward of which the effectiveness decreases with repeated exposure. We also find heterogeneity in the impact of compensation on performance across salespeople; unconditional compensation is more effective for salespeople with high base performance, whereas conditional compensation is equally effective across all types of salespeople.

How Much Is a Win Worth? An Application to Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletics in the United States have become a multibillion-dollar industry over the past several decades. In this study, we investigate the short- and long-term direct monetary effects of operating a winning athletics program for an academic institution of higher education. We construct a unique panel dataset from multiple sources and utilize the latest dynamic panel data estimation methods to account for heterogeneity while also addressing endogeneity concerns. We find that success in men’s football and basketball has a significant impact on a school’s respective football and basketball revenues; however, the effect is different based on the type of school. We find that regular season wins in football account for most of the increase in revenue for established schools whereas invitations to prestigious postseason bowl games play a big part for less-established schools. Furthermore, we find that student population and education quality dissipate the effect of athletic success on monetary payoffs. We find that success in basketball carries over more from the past than in football with additional contemporaneous marginal effects for established schools. We do find, however, that past athletic success carries over significantly to the present in both football and basketball, suggesting the significance of the long-term monetary effect of athletic success to many academic institutions in the United States.
How to Really Motivate Salespeople
Much of what we believe about the best ways to compensate and motivate the sales force is based on theory and lab experiments. But in the past decade, researchers have been moving out of the lab and into the field, analyzing companies' sales and pay data, and conducting experiments involving actual salespeople. The findings from this new wave of research support some current compensation practices but call others into question. For example, studies clearly show that caps on commissions hurt sales. If managers must retain a cap, they should set it as high as possible to avoid reducing reps' incentives. Although overly complicated compensation systems have their downsides, research has found that a system needs to include enough elements (such as quarterly performance and overachievement bonuses) to keep high performers, low performers, and average performers engaged throughout the year. Managers should be careful in setting and adjusting quotas. For instance, studies show that ratcheting (raising a salesperson's annual quota if he or she exceeded it the previous year) dampens motivation. The research also suggests that it's important to pay attention to the timing of bonuses: a reward given at the end of a period is more motivating than one given at the beginning.
Motivating Diverse Salespeople Through a Common Incentive Plan
For practical reasons, many companies offer a common incentive plan to an entire sales force rather than offering customised plans for each individual. Doug J. Chung, Thomas Steenburgh, and K. Sudhir address how companies can design a single plan that motivates everyone to work to the best of their abilities.
The Dynamic Advertising Effect of Collegiate Athletics

I measure the spillover effect of intercollegiate athletics on the quantity and quality of applicants to institutions of higher education in the United States, popularly known as the "Flutie Effect." I treat athletic success as a stock of goodwill that decays over time, similar to that of advertising. Overall, athletic success has a significant long-term goodwill effect on future applications and quality. However, students with lower than average SAT scores tend to have a stronger preference for athletic success, while students with higher SAT scores have a greater preference for academic quality.

Do Bonuses Enhance Sales Productivity? A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Bonus-Based Compensation Plans
We estimate a dynamic structural model of sales force response to a bonus based compensation plan. Substantively, the paper sheds insights on how different elements of the compensation plan enhance productivity. We find evidence that: (1) bonuses enhance productivity across all segments; (2) overachievement commissions help sustain the high productivity of the best performers even after attaining quotas; and (3) quarterly bonuses help improve performance of the weak performers by serving as pacers to keep the sales force on track to achieve their annual sales quotas. The paper also introduces two main methodological innovations to the marketing literature: First, we implement empirically the method proposed by Arcidiacono and Miller (2011) to accommodate unobserved latent class heterogeneity using a computationally light two-step estimator. Second, we illustrate how discount factors can be estimated in a dynamic structural model using field data through a combination of (1) an exclusion restriction separating current and future payoff and (2) a finite horizon model in which there is no forward looking behavior in the last period.
Published Articles
  • Chung, Doug J., Byungyeon Kim, and Byoung G. Park. "The Comprehensive Effects of Sales Force Management: A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Selection, Compensation, and Training." Management Science (forthcoming). View Details
  • Zhang, Lingling, and Doug J. Chung. "The Air War Versus the Ground Game: An Analysis of Multi-Channel Marketing in U.S. Presidential Elections." Marketing Science 39, no. 5 (September–October 2020): 872–892. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., Byungyeon Kim, and Niladri B. Syam. "A Practical Approach to Sales Compensation: What Do We Know Now? What Should We Know in the Future?" Foundations and Trends® in Marketing 14, no. 1 (2020): 1–52. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., Das Narayandas, and Dongkyu Chang. "The Effects of Quota Frequency: Sales Performance and Product Focus." Management Science (forthcoming). View Details
  • Zhang, Lingling, and Doug J. Chung. "Price Bargaining and Competition in Online Platforms: An Empirical Analysis of the Daily Deal Market." Marketing Science 39, no. 4 (July–August 2020): 687–706. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., Byungyeon Kim, and Byoung G. Park. "How Do Sales Efforts Pay Off? Dynamic Panel Data Analysis in the Nerlove-Arrow Framework." Management Science 65, no. 11 (November 2019): 5197–5218. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., Isabel Huber, Vinay Murthy, Varun Sunku, and Marije Weber. "Setting Better Sales Goals with Analytics." Harvard Business Review (website) (July 9, 2019). View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Das Narayandas. "What's the Right Kind of Bonus to Motivate Your Sales Force?" Harvard Business Review (website) (September 12, 2017). View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Das Narayandas. "Incentives versus Reciprocity: Insights from a Field Experiment." Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) 54, no. 4 (August 2017): 511–524. (Lead article.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Das Narayandas. "Study: More Frequent Sales Quotas Help Volume but Hurt Profits." Harvard Business Review (website) (August 14, 2017). View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "How Much Is a Win Worth? An Application to Intercollegiate Athletics." Management Science 63, no. 2 (February 2017): 548–565. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "How to Really Motivate Salespeople." Harvard Business Review 93, no. 4 (April 2015): 54–61. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., Thomas Steenburgh, and K. Sudhir. "Do Bonuses Enhance Sales Productivity? A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Bonus-Based Compensation Plans." Marketing Science 33, no. 2 (March–April 2014): 165–187. (Lead article. Featured in HBS Working Knowledge.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., Tom Steenburgh, and K. Sudhir. "Motivating Diverse Salespeople Through a Common Incentive Plan." European Financial Review (October–November 2013), 45–47. (Lead article.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "The Dynamic Advertising Effect of Collegiate Athletics." Marketing Science 32, no. 5 (September–October 2013): 679–698. (Lead article. Featured in HBS Working Knowledge.) View Details
Working Papers
  • Chung, Doug J., Kyoungwon Seo, and Reo Song. "Does Apple Anchor a Shopping Mall? The Effect of the Technology Stores on the Formation of Market Structure." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-066, December 2019. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Lingling Zhang. "Selling to a Moving Target: Dynamic Marketing Effects in US Presidential Elections." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 15-095, June 2015. (Revised December 2015.) View Details
Cases and Teaching Materials
  • Chung, Doug J. "Rolex SA." Harvard Business School Case 521-034, February 2021. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Sales Force Compensation." Harvard Business School Module Note 520-084, March 2020. (Revised October 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Qualtrics (A), (B), and (C)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 520-059, January 2020. (Revised March 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Commercial Sales Transformation at Microsoft." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 520-038, January 2020. (Revised March 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Sales Force Management at Nobel Ilac." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 520-057, December 2019. (Revised March 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Roush Performance: How to Design a Sales Force Compensation Plan." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 520-030, September 2019. (Revised March 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Roush Performance: How to Design a Sales Force Compensation Plan." Harvard Business School Case 519-066, January 2019. (Revised February 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Kjell and Company: Motivating Salespeople with Incentive Compensation (A), (B), (C), and (D)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 519-100, May 2019. (Revised March 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Kjell and Company: Motivating Salespeople with Incentive Compensation (A)." Harvard Business School Case 517-090, January 2017. (Revised May 2019.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Kjell and Company: Motivating Salespeople with Incentive Compensation (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 517-133, June 2017. (Revised May 2019.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Kjell and Company: Motivating Salespeople with Incentive Compensation (C)." Harvard Business School Supplement 519-095, May 2019. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Kjell and Company: Motivating Salespeople with Incentive Compensation (D)." Harvard Business School Supplement 519-096, May 2019. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Commercial Sales Transformation at Microsoft." Harvard Business School Case 519-054, January 2019. (Revised October 2019.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Gamze Yucaoglu. "Sales Force Management at Nobel Ilac." Harvard Business School Case 519-067, February 2019. (Revised July 2019.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., Mariana Cal, and Fernanda Miguel. "Devesa: Bringing Back the Glory of Argentine Beef." Harvard Business School Case 519-002, March 2019. (Revised March 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and James M. Lattin. "Qualtrics (A)." Harvard Business School Case 518-082, February 2018. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and James M. Lattin. "Qualtrics (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 518-083, February 2018. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and James M. Lattin. "Qualtrics (C)." Harvard Business School Supplement 518-084, February 2018. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Medicetra Medtech Company, Inc." Harvard Business School Case 518-049, October 2017. (Revised March 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Sarah Mehta. "Luminopia: Improving Treatment for Visual Disorders." Harvard Business School Case 517-065, April 2017. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Janalakshmi Financial Services' HR Dilemma." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 516-115, May 2016. (Revised March 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Radhika Kak. "Janalakshmi Financial Services' HR Dilemma." Harvard Business School Case 516-039, February 2016. (Revised June 2016.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Mayuka Yamazaki. "Cyberdyne: A Leap to the Future." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 516-114, May 2016. (Revised March 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Mayuka Yamazaki. "Cyberdyne: A Leap to the Future." Harvard Business School Case 516-072, January 2016. (Revised July 2018.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "ANA (A) and (B)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 516-063, January 2016. (Revised March 2020.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Mayuka Yamazaki. "ANA (A)." Harvard Business School Case 515-034, August 2014. (Revised September 2016.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Mayuka Yamazaki. "ANA (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 516-054, December 2015. (Revised September 2016.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J. "Outotec (A) and (B): Project Capture." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 514-120, April 2014. (Revised March 2020.) View Details
  • Dolan, Robert J., and Doug J. Chung. "Outotec (A): Project Capture." Harvard Business School Case 514-064, October 2013. (Revised August 2015.) View Details
  • Dolan, Robert J., and Doug J. Chung. "Outotec (B): Action Plan." Harvard Business School Supplement 514-065, October 2013. (Revised August 2015.) View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Das Narayandas. "Marketing Reading: Sales Force Design and Management (Teaching Note)." Core Curriculum Readings Series. Boston: Harvard Business Publishing 8216, 2014. View Details
  • Chung, Doug J., and Das Narayandas. "Marketing Reading: Sales Force Design and Management." Core Curriculum Readings Series. Boston: Harvard Business Publishing 8213, 2014. View Details
Research Summary
Current Research

Professor Chung models the effect of incentive compensation to study its impact on the sales force. Using data from a Fortune 500 company, he has developed a dynamic structural model of sales force response to a bonus-based compensation plan and examined how various components of the plan affect the performance of sales agents. While bonuses enhance productivity across all segments, strong and weak performers exhibit differences. The best sales people can sustain their high levels of productivity even after attaining their quotas with the incentive of overachievement commissions, and weaker performers can be kept on track toward annual quotas with the incentive of quarterly bonuses.

Professor Chung also studies the impact of unconditional incentives, such as recognition and awards. Further, he is examining how framing a compensation plan can have different outcomes in sales force performance. He finds, in the short run, that the more vicious the incentive plan is, the more immediate the impact on performance.  However, there are more negative effects in performance in the long-run. Recognition and rewards, on the other hand, have limited impact in the short-run but produce significant improvement in performance in the long-run. 

Professor Chung is expanding his research to include cultural factors by investigating the effect of local and global incentives in businesses in Asia and Latin America.

Teaching
MBA Elective Curriculum Personal Selling and Sales Force Management

Personal selling is the primary (and sometimes the only) form of marketing activity for many firms, especially in a business-to-business context. The course focuses on the tactical component of managing a salesforce and on the strategic element of linking sales force management with business strategy. The case studies used in the course will cover a variety of industries ranging from door-to-door selling to professional services firms (e.g., a law firm).

A key element of the course is a graded team project—either a field project sourced by the student(s) or a library project—that makes use of the content learned in the course to analyze a business situation and provide recommendations. 

MBA Elective Curriculum Business-to-Business Marketing

Business markets differ from consumer markets in important ways. Typically, the buying process is more complex, the buying units and purchase criteria differ, and marketing decisions are more closely interrelated with firm-wide strategic choices. In addition, personal selling (sales) is often a core part of go-to-market activities in B2B contexts. The course focuses on both the strategic and field implementation aspects of managing these issues in business markets.

A key element of the course is a graded team project—either a field project sourced by the student(s) or a library project—that makes use of the content learned in the course to analyze a business situation and provide recommendations.
Marketing Models Doctoral Seminar

This course is a doctoral level course on Quantitative Marketing. We will cover methodological as well as substantive topics this semester. Methodological topics include: Choice models, Entry and Exit models, Dynamic structural models, Bayesian estimation methods and Game theoretical models. Substantive topics include: Advertising, Word of Mouth, Sales Force Compensation, Channels of Distribution and Customer Lifetime Value.

Students will be in charge of presenting and discussing the assigned articles. They will be expected to come to class prepared, having thoroughly read all papers in each session. Each student is required to give one presentation (maximum 15 pages) during the semester on the paper assigned to them, that will include a discussion of the key ideas of the paper, the theoretical analysis, empirical tests (if any), limitations, and directions for future research that build on the issues raised by the articles. In addition, for all sessions each student will prepare a brief written summary and evaluation of the papers that are not assigned to him/her but which will be covered that day.

MBA Elective Curriculum Business Marketing and Sales

Business markets differ from consumer markets in important ways. Typically, the buying process is more complex, the buying units and purchase criteria differ, and marketing decisions are more closely interrelated with firm-wide strategic choices. In addition, personal selling and sales management are often core parts of go-to-market activities in B2B contexts. The course focuses on both the strategic and field implementation aspects of managing these issues in business markets. An important theme in both case discussions and field projects (see below) is linking strategy with sales in B2B markets.

Rather than our standard case exam, a key element of the course is a field project—either sourced by the student(s) or linked to projects sponsored by our alumni or members in our executive programs—and a paper analyzing the situation and articulating the recommendations and learnings. Students will be organized in teams for the projects.

MBA Required Curriculum Marketing

Marketing

The objectives of this course are to demonstrate the role of marketing in the company; to explore the relationship of marketing to other functions; and to show how effective marketing builds on a thorough understanding of buyer behavior to create value for customers.

Students learn how to:

  • Make marketing decisions in the context of general management.
  • Control the elements of the marketing mix—product policy, channels of distribution, communication, and pricing—to satisfy customer needs profitably.
  • Use this knowledge in a brand management simulation.

The course culminates in an examination of the evolution of marketing, particularly focusing on opportunities presented by the Internet.

Awards & Honors
Member of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society.
Finalist for the 2015 Frank M. Bass Dissertation Paper Award for the best marketing paper derived from a Ph.D. thesis published in an INFORMS-sponsored journal.
Finalist for the 2014 John D. C. Little Award for the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science or Management Science that year.
Received a 2011 ISMS Doctoral Dissertation Award for “Do Bonuses Enhance Sales Productivity? A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Bonus-Based Compensation Plans” from the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science.
Runner-up in 2011 for the Mary Kay Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Academy of Marketing Science.
Received a 2010 ISBM Doctoral Support Award for "The Design of Incentive Contracts and Its Effect on Worker Behavior" from the Institute for the Study of Business Markets.
Additional Information
  • HBS Working Knowledge
  • Curriculum Vitae
Areas of Interest
  • business marketing
  • compensation
  • marketing
  • sales force management
In The News

In The News

    • 05 Feb 2013
    • Forbes

    Marketing Effect of College Sports

    • 29 Apr 2013
    • Forbes

    The Flutie Effect: How Athletic Success Boosts College Applications

Additional Information
HBS Working Knowledge
Curriculum Vitae

Areas of Interest

business marketing
compensation
marketing
sales force management

In The News

    • 05 Feb 2013
    • Forbes

    Marketing Effect of College Sports

    • 29 Apr 2013
    • Forbes

    The Flutie Effect: How Athletic Success Boosts College Applications

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