I’m Zahra Ziaei, a doctoral candidate in Operations Management at UNC-Chapel Hill, Kenan-Flager Business School. It has been a privilege to be advised by Prof. Adam Mersereau and Prof. Seyed Emadi. My research focuses on retail and service operations, using the methods of data-driven models and structural estimation.
In my dissertation work, I explore modeling customer choice in retail settings using novel data sources. My job market paper, inferring consideration sets from heatmap data, introduces an innovative source of information for inferring customers’ consideration sets in brick-and-mortar contexts: “heatmap data.” By leveraging in-store heatmap sensors that capture anonymized aggregate traffic volume at various locations within a store, I demonstrate how this data can replicate the benefits of individual-level data for estimation of consideration set models.