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Gui Liberali, Endowed Professor of Digital Marketing at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) and ERIM Fellow will deliver his inaugural address Learning with a purpose: The balancing acts of machine learning and individuals in the digital society on Friday, 25 May 2018. He will argue that the sheer scale and velocity of online experiments allow firms to learn and apply valuable knowledge rapidly to develop better consumer services and products on an unprecedented scale, but there are challenges. Advances in machine learning and reinforcement learning are providing ways to tackle some of these challenges.

Steven Sweldens, Endowed Professor of Consumer Behavior and Marketing at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) and ERIM Fellow will deliver his inaugural address Puppets on a String? Studying Conscious and Unconscious Processes in Consumer Research on Friday, 18 May 2018. His research demonstrates that advertisements have automatic effects on consumers’ attitudes towards products and brands. Consumers are influenced by simple marketing messages without their awareness of the source of the influence, and beyond their ability to control or counter the effects. Sweldens will discuss this evidence in light of the popular theory that humans have two systems of processing information, one operating consciously, the other unconsciously. He will argue that we now should acknowledge that the human mind cannot be neatly divided into two complementary thought processing systems. The reality is much more complex.