In 1999, I took over the first chair of electronic commerce in Germany at Goethe University Frankfurt (www.ecommerce.wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de). In addition, I am a member of the managing board of the eFinance-Lab and I am in charge of the Real-Time Advertising Competence Center which is supported by Interactive Media.

My main research focus is electronic commerce and online marketing (in particular search engine marketing (www.sem-experts.com, www.prosad.de) and real-time advertising (www.rta-competence-center.de/), social media management, customer management and pricing. I wrote and published various books on topics such as “Financial Supply Chain Management”, “Prediction Markets”, “Electronic Commerce” and “Marketing with Interactive Media”. I also published articles in international journals such as Management Science, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Service Research, European Journal of Operational Research and national journals in Germany such at the Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft and the Schmalenbach’s Zeitschrift für betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung. 

I was a visiting professor and scholar at Stanford University (USA), Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge (UK), Stern School of Business at New York University (USA), Fuqua School of Business at the Duke University (USA), University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)(USA), eBusiness Research Center (eBRC) of the Smeal College of Business, Penn State University (USA), the University of Technology in Sydney (Australia), and Vienna University of Economics & Business Administration.

I received the best paper award of the German Association of Business Research twice as well as the 2011 MSI/Paul Root Award of the Journal of Marketing and the Best Paper Award of the International Journal of Research in Marketing. The German business journal “Handelsblatt” ranked me 2014 to be the most productive researcher within the past five years among all researchers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (more than researchers). It also considered my lifetime performance as one of the top 9 researchers of these three countries. Among these 9 researchers, I am the youngest one. Former students of mine nowadays are professors at the LMU Munich (Prof. Dr. Martin Spann), TU Darmstadt (Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz), University of Münster (Prof. Dr. Thorsten Wiesel, Dr. Sonja Gensler), London Business School (Prof. Dr. Anja Lambrecht), Instituto de Empresa, Madrid (Prof. Dr. Martin Böhm), Frankfurt School of Management and Finance (Prof. Dr. Christian Schulze), Goethe University Frankfurt (Prof. Dr. Christian Schlereth) and the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (Prof. Dr. Nadia Abou Nabout).

In addition, I am co-founder of two-companies, Bonpago (www.bonpago.de) and Marini-Media (www.marini-media.de), which both contribute to an even better implementation of my research findings in practice. As an example we developed www.business-schools.de providing a comprehensive overview of programs of study in the field of economics in Germany. Also I supported www.snow-online.de, a start-up having originated the tourism portal www.tourispo.com. My professional activity started as a software developer at SAP. There, I first programmed the Assembler and thereafter had the opportunity to develop one of the first interoperable applications in ABAP. My time there shaped me significantly and vitally contributed to my profound interest in the interfaces of business, information systems, and marketing. 

I enjoy most of my spare time together with my brainy wife and our three wonderful children. We all enjoy traveling. My daughters share my passion for skiing and my son shares my passion for playing chess, which I used to practice much more intensely when I was younger. During summer time, I also enjoy playing tennis.

I conduct research in three areas: Electronic commerce and online marketing, customer management and price management. Thereby I am particularly interested in the development of models that support managerial decision making. Therefore, I started developing models that help firms to run optimal search engine marketing (see www.sem-experts.com and Skiera/Nabout (2013), to find optimal shipping cost or to evaluate whether "Deal-of-the-Day" promotions (such as “Groupon vouchers”) are profitable (www.coupon-calculator.de).

While developing such models, I work closely with companies. My doctoral students are highly interested in solving business problems rigorously and have strong formal skills in the areas of statistics, mathematics and operations research. Most of my work is of empirical nature. We work often with large data samples. As a matter of fact, “Big Data” has always been relevant for us.

When launching a new research project, I always start with a clear problem definition. Then I ask myself why the solution of this problem is important and whether I have the skills to solve this problem better than most others. I am particularly interested in relatively new problems. As such, we are currently collaborating with Interactive Media in the Real-Time Advertising Competence Center. We work there on developing decision models for making better decisions in the areas of real-time advertising, also called real time bidding, including advertising exchanges, supply side platforms (SSP) and demand side platforms (DSP). For online retailers considering whether and how to use the changes in the new EU-Directive to adapt shipping and/or return policy our Return Cost Calculator may be of high interest. This
website will help you calculate the profit for various possible scenarios that are aligned with the EU-Directive and that differ in terms of offering free shipping and free returns or not. This service is free of charge, without any obligations, and the results are displayed instantly. 

In the area of customer management, I focus on the calculation of customer lifetime values. Alongside identifying possibilities for increasing the customer lifetime value I am also interested in the valuation on companies on the basis of customer lifetime values. Therefore, I also conduct a fair amount of work in “Finance & Accounting”. I am convinced, that firm valuation based on customer value yields much better results than the classical discounted cash-flow method.

As for price management, I am fascinated by the tremendous amount of new auctions that are taking place in the internet. Such auctions include the innovative approaches for selling display advertisement on advertising exchanges or Google AdWords auctions and also auctions such as the “pay-per-bid auction”. In addition, I believe that the increasing digitalization will result in more usage-based pricing models.

A list of all publications and conference contributions can be found here.

A list of all citations of Professor Skiera's work is available at Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Scholar and Social Science Citation Index (Web of Science).

More information on how to obtain a doctoral degree can be found on this page. If you are interested please do not hesitate to contact me. also in case that there is no current vacancy notice (skiera[at]wiwi.uni-frankfurt[dot]deEmail).

Prof. Dr. Martin Spann: University professor at the LMU Munich (since 2011), before university professor at the University of Passau (2005-2011)

Prof. Dr. Martin Böhm: Assistant professor at the Instituto de Empresa, Madrid, Spain (since 2006)

Prof. Dr. Thorsten Wiesel: University professor at the University of Münster (since 2012), before assistant professor at the University of Groningen, Netherlands (2008-2012), before assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2006-2009)

Dr. Sonja Gensler: Researcher and lecturer at the University of Münster, before Tenure Track assistant professor at the University of Groningen, Netherlands (2008-2012) and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2007)

Prof. Dr. Anja Lambrecht: Tenure Track assistant professor at London Business School (since 2007), before visiting professor at the University of California Los Angeles, USA (2005-2006), Member of Marketing Science Institute’s 2013 Young Scholars

Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz: University professor at the TU Darmstadt (since 2011), before junior professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt (2009-2011)

Prof. Dr. Christian Schlereth: Professor at the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management (since 2014)

Prof. Dr. Christian Schulze: Assistant Professor at the Frankfurt School of Management and Finance (since 2012)

Prof. Dr. Nadia Abou Nabout, Professor of Interactive Marketing & Social Media at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria (since 2014)