Skip to main content
My Willamette

Jameson Watts

Executive Director and Chair, Computing and Data Science Programs; Associate Professor of Marketing and Data Science

Headshot of Jameson Watts

Contact Information

Salem Campus

Address
Ford Hall 205
900 State Street
Salem  Oregon  97301
U.S.A.
Phone
503-370-6890
Email
jwatts@willamette.edu

Biography

Biography

Prior to earning his Ph.D., Jameson worked in software and digital marketing for 10 years, leading the development of a variety of early stage technology ventures. Some of these ventures were later acquired by Shutterfly Inc., Jive Software and Oracle. He was Senior Software Engineer at Wall Street on Demand in Boulder, CO; IT Manager at Mid-Valley IPA in Salem, OR; Interactive Director at Vermilion Design + Interactive in Boulder, CO; and Managing Partner at Graphex Corp. in Westminister Colorado.

As part of his Ph.D. studies, Jameson developed and taught courses in New Product Development and Intro to Marketing at the University of Arizona. He also assisted in the development of two online Social Media Marketing courses. His professional skills in methodology include topic modeling, network analysis, exponential random graph models, agent-based models and time series modeling.

Jameson was the winner of the ISBM Dissertation Proposal Competition in 2014 and was one of ten doctoral students admitted into the Santa Fe Institute’s Graduate Workshop on Complexity in the Social Sciences. Research interests include marketing strategy, social networks, big data and natural language processing.

Jameson grew up in Hawaii where he enjoyed surfing. He now makes his home in Lake Oswego, OR and is an avid mountain biker and skier.

Education

  • Ph.D., University of Arizona
  • M.B.A., Willamette University
  • B.S., University of Colorado, Boulder

Research Interests

Marketing Strategy, Principles of Marketing, Marketing Analytics, New Product Development, Social Media Marketing, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Selected Publications

2015 Jameson Watts and Kenneth Koput, “Supple Networks: Preferential Attachment by Diversity in Nascent Social Graphs,” Network Science (lead article)

Working papers:

Jameson Watts and Kenneth Koput, “The Network Value of Marketing Alliances Under Firm-Specific Uncertainty”

Jameson Watts and Yotam Schmargad, “Online Social Network Structure and the Purchase of Digital Goods”

Robert Lusch and Jameson Watts, “Representational Homogeny, Markets and Marketing: Extending the Law of Exchange”

Laura Kornish and Jameson Watts, “Website Ad Quantities: An Empirical Analysis of Traffic, Competition and Business Model”

Selected Presentations

2014 “The Network Value of Marketing Alliances Under Firm-Specific Uncertainty”, Marketing Science Conference, Atlanta, GA

2013 “Supple Networks: Preferential Attachment by Diversity in Nascent Social Graphs”, Conference on Complexity in Business, Washington, DC

2012 “Macro-level Returns to a Preference for Diversity”, Forum on Marketing and Markets, Auckland, NZ

2012 “The Social Response: Online Word of Mouth in the Wake of a Product Crisis”, Invited track at Marketing Science Conference, Boston, MA