Miguel Villas-Boas was born in Luanda, Angola on the 27th of March, 1962. His research areas are industrial organization, competitive strategy, marketing, customer relationship management and organization design. He is the J. Gary Shansby Professor of Marketing Strategy, and the Director of the Ph.D. program, at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the Chair of the Committee on Research at the University of California, Berkeley.

He completed his Licenciatura in Economics at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in 1984; in 1987 he concluded a MSc in Economics at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and in the same year a MBA at INSEAD in France. His PhD in Applied Economics was concluded in 1991 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He first went to the U.S. to do a PhD in economics/management in 1987. At that time, after considering several universities in the U.S., he decided to go to the PhD program at MIT. He was financially supported by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, and by MIT.

Miguel Villas-Boas has published 23 articles in top research journals of economics and management, 11 of which single-authored.

After his PhD at MIT, he was invited to join several universities as a tenure track Professor, including Carnegie-Mellon, Columbia, Northwestern and Yale, but decided to join Berkeley. Through the years he has had additional opportunities to join other schools, but has always decided to remain at Berkeley. In 1991, and 1994-95 he spent a sabbatical year at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

He is the principal or co-principal investigator in his research grants. He has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, Marketing Science Institute, INFORMS Society for Marketing Science, and several research institutes within Berkeley.

Currently, he works with two or three PhD students per year, and through the years he has had a total of 14 PhD students. This year, one of his PhD students has joined MIT as a tenure-track Professor, and another PhD student joined the University of Chicago, also as a tenure-track Professor. Several other former PhD students have gone on to take faculty positions in institutions like Yale University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Washington University, throughout the years.

Miguel Villas-Boas is also an Area Editor for Marketing Science, an Associate Editor for Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and is in the Editorial Board for the Journal of Marketing Research, and for the International Journal for Research in Marketing. He has also been involved in consulting projects in banking and in telecommunications. 

Furthermore, he is a founding member of SICS-Summer Institute in Competitive Strategy, and was the coordinator in both 1999 and 2002 of the Economics and Management evaluation panel of the Portuguese Research Units, organized by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT).

His research focuses in industrial organization, competitive strategy, and marketing. He is mostly known for his contributions in these areas on behavior-based price discrimination and customer recognition, endogeneity in brand choice models, advertising competition, price promotions, distribution channels, credit market competition, and product line decisions.

Miguel Villas-Boas says that his “long-run objectives are to be able to do research at the highest level with impact in the field and surrounded by top researchers”.

He has received several invitations to return to Portugal along the years, all of them providing excellent conditions. However, the high level conditions available at Berkeley in terms of research support are difficult to match.

AWARDS

His dissertation was awarded the Prize Robert Schuman. He also received a grant from the National Science Foundation, and several of his papers were recognized as among the finalists for the John D.C. Little Best Paper Award, for the best paper in marketing published in an INFORMS journal. He has also been a Faculty Fellow, and plenary speaker, at several AMA and ISMS doctoral consortia.

  villas at haas.berkeley.edu