Anne Coughlan

Anne Coughlan holds the Polk Bros. Chair in Retailing, and is Emeritus Professor of Marketing, at the Kellogg School of Management. She joined the Kellogg faculty in 1985. Anne’s main research interests are in the areas of distribution channels, sales force management and compensation, and pricing. Current research projects include measuring compliance, monitoring, and enforcement of MAP policies; wardrobing and optimal open-box retail sales; sales force diversification and optimal group incentive payments; optimal management of multi-level marketing distribution channels; and drivers of, and management of, sales force retention and turnover.

Anne serves as Editor-in- Chief of the Social Science Research Network’s Marketing Research Network and of its Quantitative Marketing e-Journal and Marketing Science e- Journal. She is currently a Research Fellow of the Direct Selling Educational Foundation. She has served as President of the INFORMS College on Marketing, an Associate Editor and Editorial Board member of the academic journal Marketing Science, and on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Marketing and Journal of Retailing.

For her excellence in teaching, Anne was the recipient of Kellogg’s Executive Master's Program Teacher of the Year Award for the best elective course in 1996 and again in 2003, as well as receiving the Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award in 2000-01. She teaches classes on distribution channel strategies at the MBA, executive MBA, and outside executive education levels, and on quantitative models in marketing at the doctoral level. She is the author of several teaching cases on distribution channel design and strategy, and advises firms on their go-to- market and pricing strategies.

Anne received her Ph.D. in Economics at Stanford University. Prior to her appointment at Kellogg, she was a professor at the business school of the University of Rochester. She was a Visiting Professor of Marketing at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France in 1997- 98. Anne is an avid indoor gardener with over 500 cacti, succulents, bromeliads, and other exotic plants.