Teaching Bayesian Statistics to Marketing and Business Students

We discuss our experiences teaching Bayesian Statistics to students in doctoral programs in business. These students often have weak backgrounds in mathematical statistics and a predisposition against likelihood-based methods stemming from prior exposure to econometrics. This can be overcome by an intense course which emphasizes the value of the Bayesian approach to solving non-trivial problems. The success of our course is primarily due to the emphasis on statistical computing. This is facilitated by our R package, bayesm, which provides efficient implementation of advanced methods and models