The PhD program in Marketing is based on twenty graduate-level courses: six marketing seminars, a statistics sequence, an economics sequence, two to three courses in a related field, and six to seven electives, as well as the dissertation. Of the twenty courses, eight can consist of transfer courses for graduate work at other universities.

These courses assume that the student has a basic knowledge of various business areas, computer programming, calculus, and matrix algebra.

The program's specific objectives are:

• To provide an interdisciplinary environment for the generation of creative ideas and hypotheses in marketing.
  
  
• To provide sufficient analytic skills for evaluation (and implementation) of these ideas (i.e., critical insight).
  
  
• To provide training in the communication of these ideas to others.
  
  
• To encourage a type of cumulative contribution to the marketing field by a process of learning how to learn (i.e., the strategy of scholarly inquiry).

The program implements these objectives by means of a varied program of seminars, joint research projects, and colloquia.

List of Courses

Basic Courses
Students take: Economics (681, 682, 701, 705, 780, or equivalent approved by Wharton Marketing Department Doctoral Coordinator) and Statistics (510 and 550, and 511 or 551).

Major Field Requirements
The Marketing Department requires six PhD seminars (MKTG 963, 964, 966, 967, 968, 969). These seminars cover those areas of marketing in which all PhD Marketing students should have basic competence, not only to understand the contemporary literature, but to contribute to the future of the discipline. All Marketing students are expected to take these seminars.

The seminars involve in-depth consideration of various aspects of marketing. Ordinarily, a student taking these seminars will have already completed some work in quantitative methods and perhaps also in behavioral sciences. The general objectives of these seminars are to discuss contemporary research problems and relevant literature and to describe concepts and techniques for handling the research questions, current and future, in each of the following fields:

• MKTG 960 - Judgment and Decision Making Perspective on Consumer Behavior
• MKTG 961 - Economic/OR Models in Marketing
• MKTG 963 - Information Processing Perspectives on Consumer Behavior
• MKTG 964 - Empirical Models in Marketing
• MKTG 966 - Measurement and Data Analysis in Marketing
• MKTG 967 - Research Methods in Marketing
• MKTG 968 - Advanced Topics in Consumer Behavior
• MKTG 969 - Advanced Topics in Marketing Research

• Communication Research
• Decision Processes
• Economics
• Econometrics
• Information Systems
• Operations Research
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Statistics

Sample Program Sequence

• Year 1 Fall
  MKTG 967, MKTG 960, STAT 510 or 551, ECON 681 or 701
  
  
• Year 1 Spring
  MKTG 961, MKTG 966 STAT 511 or 551, ECON 682
  
  
• Year 1 Summer
  Marketing Preliminary Exam
  
  
• Year 2 Fall
  MKTG 963, MKTG 968, Electives, Research Paper
  
  
• Year 2 Spring
  MKTG 964, MKTG 969, Electives, Research
  
  
• Year 3 Fall, Spring
  Electives, Dissertation proposal defense
  
  
• Year 4 Fall, Spring
  Electives, Final dissertation defense