Zsolt Katona
Cheryl and Christian Valentine Professor | Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA, UNITED STATES
Areas of Expertise (4)
Online Marketing
Search Advertising
Network Economics
Social Networks
About
Zsolt Katona is Cheryl and Christian Valentine Professor at the Haas School of Business. Katona joined Berkeley Haas in 2008 as an assistant professor of marketing. His research focuses on online marketing strategy, networks, and social media. He studies how firms can better take advantage of new digital technologies and how they can integrate them into their marketing mix.
Katona is faculty director of the Fisher Center for Business Analytics at the Haas School. He was named a Marketing Science Institute Scholar awardee and was a Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellow. He is associate editor of the journals Management Science and Marketing Science, and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Research in Marketing. Before joining Berkeley Haas, Katona received his PhD in management (marketing) from INSEAD. He also holds a PhD in computer science and an MSc in Mathematics, Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary.
Education (3)
INSEAD: PhD, Management (Marketing)
Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary: PhD, Computer Science
Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary: MSc, Mathematics
Links (4)
Honors & Awards (4)
MSI Alden G. Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition Winner
2007
Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship
2007
Association for Consumer Research Best Working Paper Award
2006
AMA Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium Fellow
2006
Selected External Service & Affiliations (1)
- Ad-hoc reviewer: Marketing Science; Journal of Marketing Research
Positions Held (1)
At Haas since 2008
2014 – 2017, Associate Professor, Berkeley Haas 2008 – 2014, Assistant Professor, Berkeley Haas
Media Appearances (5)
'Brands Are Really Going To Be Judged.' Companies Are Walking a Tightrope During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Time online
2020-04-02
Brands making hokey efforts to recognize social distancing can backfire. If such moves actually help people remember that isolating themselves is crucial to stunting the spread of COVID-19 then it's a good idea, says Zsolt Katona, Cheryl and Christian Valentine Associate Professor. But it also runs the risk of looking like a PR stunt, he says.
Alternative data and the sophisticated investor advantage
Canadian Investment Review online
2019-05-02
A new study by Assoc. Prof Panos Patatoukas, L.H. Penney Chair in Accounting, and Cheryl and Christian Valentine Assoc. Prof. Zsolt Katona found that buying and selling a retailer's stock based on satellite data can yield a 4.7% higher return than the typical benchmark return.
Retailers want more than your cash this holiday season
Marketplace online
2018-11-28
The holiday shopping season often means people visit stores and retail websites they don't typically frequent. And with that comes requests for personal data that retailers can use to target ads and promotions. But one-time shoppers aren't always interested, said Zsolt Katona, Cheryl and Christian Valentine Associate Professor.
Business Analytics Wave Sweeps Across B-Schools
Poets anad Quants online
2018-01-22
Zsolt Katona, a professor of marketing and director of the recently launched Fisher Center for Business Analytics at the UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business, puts it this way: “What we notice is that even though there are a lot of interest and initiatives, there’s still a gap between data science and application to relevant business problems and trying to solve them. We’re not doing basic data science, but finding avenues to apply data in practical ways to real business problems and to generate real solutions.”
WATCH: Berkeley Does Ballroom
California Magazine online
2017-01-11
Partners in dance (and life), UC Berkeley Haas Business School associate professor Zsolt Katona, and Timea Potys, former Cal Ballroom team coach and owner of Sizzling Latin Ballroom Company, travel the world to compete in ballroom dance competitions—nearly 30 each year.
Selected Papers & Publications (14)
Agenda Chasing and Contests among News Providers
RAND Journal of Economics
Zsolt Katona, Jonathan Knee, and Miklos Sarvary
2017
Predicting Mobile Advertising Response Using Consumer Co-Location Networks
Journal of Marketing
Peter Zubcsek, Zsolt Katona, and Miklos Sarvary
2017
Competing for Attention in Social Communication Markets
Management Science
Ganesh Iyer and Zsolt Katona
2016
Democracy in Product Design: Consumer Participation and Differentiation Strategies
Quantitative Marketing and Economics
Zsolt Katona
2015
Information Communities: The Network Structure of Communication
Social Networks
Peter Zubcsek, Imran Chowdhury and Zsolt Katona
2014
Maersk Line: B2B Social Media - ‘It’s Communication, Not Marketing''
California Management Review
Zsolt Katona and Miklos Sarvary
2014
The Role of Search Engine Optimization in Search Rankings
Marketing Science
Ron Berman and Zsolt Katona
2013
Media, Aggregators and the Link Economy: Strategic Hyperlink Formation in Content Networks
Management Science
Chrysanthos Dellarocas, Zsolt Katona and William Rand
2013
Most Probably Intersecting Families of Subsets
Combinatorics, Probability and Computing
Gyula O.H. Katona, Gyula Y. Katona, and Zsolt Katona
2012
Network Formation and the Structure of the Commercial World Wide Web,” with Miklos Sarvary
Marketing Science
Zsolt Katona and Miklos Sarvary
2008
A New Class of Scale-Free Graphs
Statistics and Probability Letters
Zsolt Katona and Tamas Mori
2005
Teaching (1)
Business to Business Marketing
MBA 267
Social