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.
Jeffrey T. Prince
Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy,
Harold A. Poling Chair in Strategic Management,
Co-Director, Kelley Institute for Business Analytics,
Kelley School of Business,
Indiana University
Jeff Prince is an expert on the economics of technology and telecommunications markets. An empirical economist with extensive research in industrial organization and applied econometrics, Professor Prince analyzes the economics of digital platforms, the value of privacy, adoption of video streaming services, and usage of broadband and mobile internet. He has evaluated how firms compete on non-price attributes, the competitive effects of mergers in the airline industry, and regulation and competition in healthcare markets.
Professor Prince served as chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2019 to 2020. While at the FCC, he coauthored the agency’s comments on the Department of Justice’s and Federal Trade Commission’s Draft 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines.
As an expert witness, Professor Prince has been retained in multiple high-profile matters. He has testified in deposition and at trial, on topics related to antitrust, intellectual property valuation, and damages. He has also consulted on telecommunications policy, competition policy and antitrust, damages, and survey design, including design of conjoint surveys.
Professor Prince has coauthored and coedited several books about the digital economy, including The Metaverse: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press) and Conglomerates and Ecosystems in the Digital Era (Cambridge University Press). In addition, he publishes his research in leading academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, Management Science, and the Review of Industrial Organization. He coedits the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy and has served on the editorial board of Information Economics and Policy for more than a decade. In addition, the New York Times, Psychology Today, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal have cited his work.
Professor Prince has been honored with awards for excellence and innovation in teaching. At Indiana University, he teaches courses on digital economics and predictive analytics for business strategy. Previously, he served on the faculty at Cornell University.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Gal Zauberman
Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Professor of Marketing,
Yale School of Management,
Yale University
Gal Zauberman is an expert in consumer behavior, and judgment and decision making. He has researched the factors that affect individuals’ evaluations, preferences, and choices; the role of time in decisions; consumer financial decision making; and evaluations of experiences.
Professor Zauberman has provided expert witness testimony in many cases, including at the class certification stage of multiple consumer class actions. He has addressed allegations of false advertising, product misrepresentation, and misleading retail pricing practices, and evaluated a range of issues in the consumer goods, professional services, and retail industries. Professor Zauberman has substantial experience with designing and conducting consumer surveys and controlled experiments, both as part of his expert witness work and his academic research.
He has coauthored peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and his research has been published in leading marketing and psychology journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Science, Psychological Science, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics. His work has received international coverage from the New York Times and Scientific American, among other media outlets.
The Journal of Marketing Research has honored Professor Zauberman with both the William F. O’Dell and the Paul E. Green best paper awards for significant contributions to marketing research, methodology, and/or practice. Professor Zauberman also received the 2007 Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Consumer Psychology from the American Psychological Association.
For over two decades, Professor Zauberman has taught undergraduate, graduate, and executive education courses on consumer behavior, financial decision making, marketing management, and marketing research methods. Prior to joining the Yale School of Management, he served on the faculty of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Ronald T. Wilcox
NewMarket Corporation Professor of Business Administration,
Darden School of Business,
University of Virginia
Ronald Wilcox is an expert in marketing research, marketing analytics, customer relationship management, marketing of financial services, and branding. His litigation experience includes analysis of class certification and damages issues, as well as conducting and rebutting consumer surveys, including conjoint surveys. Professor Wilcox has also provided trial testimony related to branding.
Professor Wilcox formerly served as an economist at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He was also an assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon Graduate School of Industrial Administration. Professor Wilcox has consulted to numerous companies, including Sikorsky, Johnson & Johnson, and Visa.
Professor Wilcox’s research has appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Marketing Science, and other leading marketing and finance journals. His findings have been cited in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Businessweek.
He is a frequent contributor to Forbes and the author of the book Whatever Happened to Thrift? Why Americans Don’t Save and What to Do about It, published by Yale University Press and listed among the Top Five Business Books of 2008 by Kiplinger. Professor Wilcox also coauthored the book Cutting-Edge Marketing Analytics: Real World Cases and Data Sets for Hands On Learning, on the use of customer data to improve marketing decisions, published by FT Press.
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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Samid Hussain
Samid Hussain
Senior Vice President
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Vildan Altuglu
Vildan Altuglu
Vice President
Featured Publications
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