Talk the Walk: Predicting Pricing Power Using Top Management Team’s Language
With Niels Holtrop, Joost M.E. Pennings, Thomas Post, and Hauke Wetzel
Pricing power is a fundamental driver of long-term value, yet accounting measures like the price–cost margin are backward-looking and cost-contaminated. Using dependency parsing on earnings calls, we build a continuous, firm-level measure of communicated pricing power, decomposed into realized and expected signals. Across 55,664 firm-quarters (3,138 U.S. firms, 2018–2024), the realized component aligns with accounting proxies while the expected component anticipates future price–cost margins — managerial language moves before the accounting record.
Market Your Share! How Marketing Capability and its Communication Drive Firm Value through Analyst & Investor Relationships
With Niels Holtrop, Joost M.E. Pennings, and Thomas Post
Using survey-based Analyst & Investor Relationships (AIR) across 1,159 U.S. firms (2015–2020), we show AIR contributes positively to Total q. Marketing capabilities strengthen AIR, and communicating MC in earnings calls amplifies this link. Moderation analyses reveal context-dependent pathways through analyst coverage and institutional ownership.
Ongoing Projects
MFX COE × Evidenza.AI · Dec 2025–present
Synthetic Measurement of Pricing Power
Lead researcher — responsible for study design and analysis
Market research increasingly relies on synthetic respondents: customer panels simulated by large language models. This project asks whether their answers reflect real differences between firms. We field established price-sensitivity tests on synthetic buyer panels and compare the resulting price elasticities, firm by firm, with financial measures of pricing power.
- Design: Gabor–Granger-style price tests for a cross-industry sample of U.S. pure-play firms, with shifted reference prices to separate genuine price sensitivity from anchoring on the price shown.
- Benchmarks: price–cost margin, profit elasticity, and the text-based pricing-power measure from Talk the Walk.
- Next phase: a buyer-side, multi-dimensional pricing-power questionnaire, aggregated into a single score.
- Status (Oct 2026): pilot completed; full-sample validation in progress.
