"We Are GSM" Video - Meet Assistant Professor Mike Palazzolo

From MBA Student to Professor: A Journey Back to UC Davis

I'm an assistant professor of marketing at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management. I actually was an MBA student here before, and some of the professors convinced me to go get my Ph.D. When I was done, they hired me to come back, which I was excited to do because I had so much fun here the first time around.

My job consists of effectively two components, teaching and doing research. So teaching is rewarding in a more immediate way. I get to see the advances students are making towards their career. Research can take years and years and years to complete, but when you're done, it's a really great feeling. And it's nice to know that you have created something that will last the test of time.

Connecting Marketing and Economics

So, I'm in marketing, and really, my research interests sort of straddle the marketing realm and the economics realm. And specifically, I'm interested in the intersection between consumer behavior and consumer welfare.

I would personally like my research to not only contribute knowledge to the world, but maybe, hopefully, if I'm lucky, make some people's lives better as a result. And so I study sort of two streams of research with this goal in mind.

One is consumer financial decision making, and the other is consumer nutrition.

Recently, research in the marketing space, not just my own, has looked at nutrition labels, and they were designed to help people make healthier choices at the grocery store. So, one project I'm currently working on is examining whether, recommendation systems, that are built around not only helping people make healthier choices, but specifically healthier choices that the model thinks they would like the taste of based on their past purchases, might work better than just making recommendations based on nutrition alone.

Broadly speaking, most of my research does revolve around making causal inferences, trying to understand how some policy or intervention affects consumers lives, affects consumers behaviors. And so it's a very natural fit for me to teach this in the classroom.

Studying Economic Inequality Through Research

My very first research project, was looking at how low-income consumers potentially lose money because they don't have the liquidity necessary to do some of the things that we might take for granted.

For example, not being able to buy a giant bulk thing of toilet paper. Or not being able to buy something a month early when it's on sale, just cause like, oh, hey, I could save money, but I don't really need it right now.

That particular paper got a good amount of press coverage, and that when I was interviewing here, people from other departments heard about it. I was invited to join as an affiliate, the Center for Poverty and Inequality Research, which has been really rewarding.

So for anyone considering education, in the business space, when you arrive at your institution, you hit the ground running pretty fast. When summer hits, don't treat it necessarily as your vacation before grad school. Treat it as the time for you to reflect on what you want to get out of grad school.

My Favorite Hobbies: Karaoke and Board Games

So outside of the GSM and sometimes inside of the GSM, karaoke is one of my, one of my hobbies. Also, I love playing board games. But not the sort of family-friendly board games you'd think of, like Monopoly. I'm more of the, like, four-hour economic engine building. You know, my friends and I play and we want to kill each other by the end, sort of board game. 

We Are GSM.