Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Natalie Mizik
Professor of Marketing,
J. Gary Shansby Endowed Chair in Marketing Strategy,
Foster School of Business,
University of Washington
Natalie Mizik is an expert in marketing strategy. She specializes in developing methods for assessing the effect of marketing activities on firms’ financial performance, and in valuing brands and other intangible marketing assets. She has also conducted research on factors that impact physician prescribing behavior, including marketing activities.
Professor Mizik is an experienced expert witness with class certification and deposition testimony expertise. As an expert witness, she has analyzed marketing data, conducted consumer surveys, and rebutted conjoint analysis. She has opined on issues related to pharmaceutical marketing, brands and branding, and valuation of personal data.
In a product misrepresentation consumer class action, Johannessohn et al. v. Polaris Industries Inc., Professor Mizik demonstrated methodological errors in the plaintiffs’ conjoint survey. She served as an expert for a regional healthcare provider in a data privacy consumer class action, rebutting plaintiffs’ damages methodology and opining on class certification issues. Professor Mizik has also served as an expert for pharmaceutical companies in intellectual property rights disputes, breach of contract, and false claims disputes.
In her research, Professor Mizik collects and analyzes primary data, such as consumer surveys, as well as secondary data, such as sales and stock prices. Her methodological expertise covers statistics, econometrics, conjoint analysis, and consumer surveys.
Professor Mizik publishes in leading academic journals, and serves as the editor-in-chief for Marketing Letters and is on the editorial board of Marketing Science. She is a coeditor of the book Handbook of Marketing Analytics: Methods with Applications in Marketing Management, Public Policy, and Litigation Support. She has served as a member of the Academic Council of the American Marketing Association (AMA) and as an officer of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science.
Professor Mizik has received numerous research and teaching awards. Notable among these are the AMA’s Distinguished Service Award, the Erin Anderson Award for an Emerging Female Marketing Scholar and Mentor, and the Varadarajan Award for Early Career Contributions to Marketing Strategy. She has twice received the Marketing Science Institute’s Robert D. Buzzell Best Paper Award, which honors research that makes a significant contribution to marketing practice and thought. In addition, Professor Mizik has been recognized multiple times for teaching excellence in the MBA, Executive MBA, and Technology Management MBA programs at both the Foster School of Business and Columbia Business School.
Prior to joining the University of Washington, Professor Mizik served as a faculty member at the Columbia Business School and the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and as a visiting associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Yeşim Orhun
Associate Professor of Marketing,
Ross School of Business;
Associate Professor,
School of Information;
University of Michigan
Yeşim Orhun is an expert in behavioral economics and quantitative marketing. Professor Orhun’s industry expertise includes consumer packaged goods, retail, consumer health, higher education, and transportation. She served four years on the board of directors for Consumer Reports.
In litigation matters involving alleged misrepresentations in consumer goods, Professor Orhun has analyzed consumer behavior and economic issues pertaining to class certification.
Professor Orhun uses experimental, survey, and econometric methods in her research, which focuses on two main areas. In one research stream, she studies how individuals construct beliefs and preferences, and the two-way relations between information acquisition and consumer choice. In another research stream, Professor Orhun studies product competition, strategic differentiation, and price discrimination. More recently, she has focused on combining these two research streams to examine the unintended consequences of policies and competitive strategies.
Professor Orhun has published articles in leading marketing and economics journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Management Science. Her paper on consumer spending and saving practices received the Paul E. Green Award for significant contributions to marketing research, methodology, and/or practice, and was covered by The Atlantic, Business Insider, NPR, and the Washington Post.
Professor Orhun is an associate editor of the Journal of Marketing Research and the International Journal of Market Research and serves on the editorial board of Marketing Science.
At the Ross School of Business, Professor Orhun teaches courses in strategic marketing, marketing management, and causal inference to M.B.A., executive M.B.A., and Ph.D. students. Previously, she served on the faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where she taught marketing strategy and behavioral economics to M.B.A. and Ph.D. students. Professor Orhun has been recognized multiple times for excellence in teaching.
Professor Orhun is a fellow in the University of Michigan’s ADVANCE Faculty Fellows Program, in which senior Michigan academics research new approaches to institutional transformation. She is also a Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow in the Ross School of Business.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
David J. Reibstein
William Stewart Woodside Professor of Marketing,
The Wharton School,
University of Pennsylvania
David Reibstein is a nationally prominent marketing expert, with particular expertise in competitive marketing strategy, branding, marketing performance measurement, and marketing research methods.
An experienced expert witness, Professor Reibstein has provided testimony in patent infringement and intellectual property matters, as well as consumer class actions. In a number of matters, he has assessed the validity and reliability of conjoint surveys, a topic on which he has published several articles. As part of his expert testimony, Professor Reibstein has designed and conducted consumer perception surveys. In addition, he has testified on a variety of marketing topics, including issues related to branding and brand equity. Professor Reibstein’s academic and consulting work spans a variety of industries, such as consumer products, finance, pharmaceuticals, retail, technology, and telecommunications.
The past chair of the board of directors of the American Marketing Association, Professor Reibstein is also the former executive director of the Marketing Science Institute. He has consulted on marketing strategy to General Electric, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Novartis, among others.
Professor Reibstein’s work has been published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, and the Journal of Marketing Research. He is the author or coauthor of numerous book chapters and books, including Marketing Metrics: The Manager’s Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance. Professor Reibstein has served on the editorial boards of peer-reviewed publications. His research has received extensive coverage in the mainstream media, notably the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, and “Marketplace.”
An award-winning educator for over four decades, Professor Reibstein has been honored more than thirty times for excellence in teaching. He has held academic appointments at Stanford Graduate School of Business, INSEAD, and Harvard Business School.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
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.
Consumer Fraud and Product Liability Capabilities
Cornerstone Research has addressed issues of certification, exposure, reliance, impact, and damages in class actions. Key questions in these cases may include whether common evidence can prove that certain challenged conduct caused each member of the proposed class to make a purchase and whether the challenged conduct injured each member of the proposed class. An additional consideration is whether each proposed class member’s damages, if any, can be determined by common proof. We have worked on class actions involving allegations of:
- The benefit of the bargain harm, where plaintiffs claim that consumers would have allegedly paid less or not purchased the product at issue had they not allegedly been misled or had defendants not acted in in bad faith, because of improper labeling, advertising, or disclosure
- Diminished resale value of a durable good due to the challenged conduct
- Demand and price inflation claims that plaintiffs argue caused class-wide impact, even for consumers who were not influenced by the challenged conduct
Class certification in these cases frequently turns on the particulars of the challenged conduct, the overall structure of the industry and the market, and the characteristics of individual transactions. We evaluate these issues through empirical research within a framework of sound economic concepts.
Individual actions involving allegations of fraud and misrepresentation are often brought by a defendant’s competitors. These cases may require a focus on the relevant market, quantification of the effect of the challenged conduct on demand and prices for competing products, and estimation of damages suffered by competitors due to the defendant’s alleged fraud or misrepresentation.
In addition to lost sales and price erosion, some plaintiffs may also seek reputational damages and punitive damages. We have substantial experience analyzing these specific types of claims, applying our expertise in economics, marketing, finance, econometrics, and accounting.
Our experience in individual actions includes allegations of fraud and misrepresentation in matters involving a broad array of industries and consumer products.
Cornerstone Research staff and experts have significant experience in survey design, including analyzing and implementing reliable sampling techniques. We regularly conduct and critique surveys of market participants to assess consumer behavior, attitudes, and preferences, and to address issues relating to exposure, reliance, and materiality. In some cases, we supplemented these empirical findings with analysis of data originally collected over the course of business as well as from publicly available data sources.
Cornerstone Research regularly formulates and implements empirical analyses to respond to economic and financial issues. We have specialized staff with expertise in advanced modeling and statistical techniques, including difference-in-differences, hedonic regression, and synthetic control methods, among others. We frequently use real-world, large datasets with sophisticated statistical and econometric methods.
We have experience working with experts to develop and implement rigorous, state-of-the-art content analysis techniques—including artificial intelligence and machine learning—to assess marketing messages (such as advertisements), social media and user-generated online content, and other content involving extensive textual data, such as public press spanning many years.
Conjoint analysis is a survey-based marketing research tool developed by academics to understand and estimate consumer preferences. It has been adopted by businesses and industry practitioners to help make decisions on new product development and market segmentation analysis, among other uses. Over the last several years, conjoint analysis has been increasingly proposed as a method to estimate class-wide damages in a variety of consumer class actions including product liability, false advertising, product labeling, and data privacy and data breach matters. However, the technique’s underlying assumptions and limitations render it unsuitable for calculating damages in a class action setting.
Automobile
Cornerstone Research has rich experience in analyzing causation, impact, and damages issues in the automobile industry. We have addressed allegations of benefit of the bargain harm and diminished resale value in these cases.
Consumer Finance
We have worked on consumer finance cases involving credit cards, checking accounts, and pension plan choices. Our experience encompasses fraud and misrepresentation allegations as well as deceptive advertising and inadequate disclosure claims.
Food, Beverage, and Dietary Supplements
In the food, beverage, and dietary supplements industries, Cornerstone Research has applied economic and statistical methods and marketing research techniques such as surveys to cases involving allegations of false advertising, omissions of material information, and product misrepresentation. We have worked on matters involving “All Natural” claims on product labels, health-related claims on product packaging and advertising, the amount of “slack-fill” in product packaging, the amounts of ingredients included in a product, and comparative advertising between competing products, among others.
Life Sciences and Healthcare
We have worked on several cases involving allegations of fraud and misrepresentation in life sciences and healthcare matters.
Technology
In several technology and manufacturing cases, attorneys have retained Cornerstone Research to analyze issues related to alleged false advertising, deception, product liability, and demand and price inflation.
Other Consumer Products
Our staff have assessed allegations of false advertising, deception, and product liability in many consumer products.
Data Privacy and Data Breach
Cornerstone Research has experience in high-profile data privacy and data breach matters, addressing a wide range of damages methodologies and analyses commonly used by plaintiffs in class actions in the United States.
Our experience covers all stages of litigation, including pre-litigation assessment of exposure, support for mediation, and expert testimony support at the class certification and merits phases. We also have substantial experience assisting clients in regulatory proceedings relating to data privacy or data breach issues in the United States and Europe.
Featured Cases
Selected Professionals
Our staff consultants contribute expertise in economics, finance, accounting, and marketing, as well as business acumen, familiarity with the litigation process, and a commitment to provide outstanding support.
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