Moving business forward: UC Berkeley Haas introduces a refreshed strategic narrative
Updated July 17
Berkeley Haas economist Przemyslaw Jeziorski, who applied his exceptional curiosity, analytical talents, and sense of justice to questions about a range of markets—and to helping his students grow comfortable with data—died on July 4 in the outskirts of Athens, Greece. He was 43.
Greek police have said Jeziorski was the victim of a homicide.
“I am heartbroken by news of the tragic and sudden death of Professor Przemyslaw Jeziorski, a beloved member of our marketing faculty and Haas community,” said Dean Jenny Chatman. “Our focus is on supporting our community during this difficult period. My heart goes out to Przemek’s family and loved ones. We will miss him.”
Jeziorski was a father of two and a tenured associate professor of marketing who held the Egon and Joan von Kaschnitz Distinguished Professorship in Business Administration. He had a passion for teaching, and during his 13 years at Berkeley Haas he taught data analytics skills to more than 1,500 MBA and PhD students.
Professor Zsolt Katona helped hire Jeziorski to the Haas Marketing Group in 2012. “It’s hard to come to terms with this senseless tragedy. He was an amazing person, friend, and colleague. He was a loving father of two young children and always there if someone needed help,” said Katona, the Cheryl and Christian Valentine Professor. “He had great influence on the marketing field not only through his research but through his energetic presence and optimism combined with a healthy dose of skepticism.”
Teaching for success
Jeziorski, a native of Poland who encouraged colleagues, students, and friends to simplify his name to Przemek (Pshemek) or PJ, created a popular MBA marketing analytics course. Lawrence Tan, an Evening & Weekend MBA student and senior engineering manager at Apple, completed the class this spring.
“From day one, I remember thinking to myself, ’Wow, if every lecture is like this, I’m going to learn a ton in this course.’ It was, and I did,” says Tan, BS 00 (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), MBA 26. “He made the subject so accessible that you could take it even if you knew zero Python going in. He was so proud of how much he improved the course over the years that he’d taught it.”
The skills Jeziorski taught have proven especially valuable in the workplace, said Scott Diddams, MBA 24, a product manager at Microsoft. “Sharing and applying the learnings from PJ’s class got me the job that I currently have and a couple promotions on top,” he said. “A great professor not only teaches the lesson but cultivates within their students the sense of curiosity that sets them on the path of continuous discovery and learning. One that persists long after classes are finished. Dr. PJ was one of these professors.”
“A great professor not only teaches the lesson but cultivates within their students the sense of curiosity that sets them on the path of continuous discovery and learning. One that persists long after classes are finished. Dr. PJ was one of these professors.”
—Scott Diddams, MBA 24
Jeziorski was especially dedicated to mentoring his PhD students. Fan Zhang, PhD 23, an assistant professor at Nova School of Business and Economics in Portugal, has maintained a collaborative relationship with Jeziorski since graduation. “He is one of the most intelligent, innovative, and energetic people I have ever met. I have benefited a lot from him as an advisor and coauthor, during and after Berkeley,” she said. “He will be deeply missed.”
Early talent for math
Born April 24, 1982, Jeziorski grew up in Gdynia, a northern Polish city on the Baltic Sea. His brother Łukasz said, despite being four years his junior, “We were like twins. We understood each other without words.” The brothers shared a love for metal music and sci-fi movies; Jeziorski took up classical and then electric guitar, and loved playing soccer.
“We were like twins. We understood each other without words.”
—Łukasz Jeziorski, brother
Jeziorski graduated in 2001 from Gdynia’s Naval High School III, considered one of the best secondary schools in the country. He was among a tight-knit group of math-focused classmates who competed in math, chess, and bridge tournaments, according to classmate Olga Adamkiewicz, chief marketing & sales officer for KGS SA, Poland’s national food industry group.
“Przemek was an exceptionally gifted and hard-working person, known for his sharp mind and, at times, his stubborn determination. Even in high school, he had a remarkable ability to analyze complex problems from multiple angles and to consider different perspectives—a skill that eventually led him to pursue a scientific career,” Adamkiewicz says. “Beneath his sharp intellect, he was a kind and compassionate soul. He was a dreamer at heart, filled with hopes and ambitions, with an innate curiosity about the world.”
“Przemek was an exceptionally gifted and hard-working person, known for his sharp mind and, at times, his stubborn determination. Beneath his sharp intellect, he was a kind and compassionate soul. He was a dreamer at heart, filled with hopes and ambitions, with an innate curiosity about the world.”
—Olga Adamkiewicz, friend and high school classmate
Jeziorski maintained close relationships with his family and friends, reuniting in Gdynia nearly every Christmas with his parents, bother, childhood friends. “He had always wanted to go to the U.S.A.; it was his dream,” Lukasz Jeziorski said. After he achieved it, he brought Lukasz over for his first trip abroad; they later traveled around the world together.
Educational pursuit
After high school, Jeziorski left Gdynia to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in quantitative methods and information systems from the Warsaw School of Economics before moving to the United States to continue his education. He completed two more master’s degrees—an MA and economics and an MS in Mathematics—from the University of Arizona before beginning a doctoral program in economics at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) in 2006.
“The area that particularly caught my attention was dynamic game theory,” he wrote in a note introducing himself to Stanford classmates. “I view it as the missing piece tying together static industrial organization theory and real world applications.”
The economics PhD program in within the GSB is tiny and elite, accepting just three to five students per year, compared to 50 to 60 in Stanford’s larger Economics Department program. GSB economics Professor Lanier Benkard served as Jeziorski’s advisor.
“He was extremely technically talented and hardworking. Things that were hard for most people were easy for him,” said Benkard, who collaborated with Jeziorski on a recent NBER working paper on market dynamics. “He was a very understated guy and didn’t toot his own horn.”
“He was extremely technically talented. Things that were hard for most people were easy for him.”
—Professor Lanier Benkard, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Remarkably, Jeziorski took just four years—including two years of coursework—to complete the program, compared to the usual five or six, Benkard said. He lived so frugally on his graduate student stipend that he was able to invest the excess money in the stock market and do quite well, Benkard said.
Soon after he arrived at Stanford, Jeziorski’s empirical research skills caught the attention of Ilya Segal, a professor in the economics department with a focus on theoretical research. He invited Jeziorski to join him for a summer project at Microsoft Research.
“He really taught me a lot about empirical work and the statistical methods that were quite useful,” Segal says. The two went on to publish an influential 2015 paper that challenged some central assumptions used in the models of search advertising auctions, showing that people don’t make mechanical choices to click on ads from top to bottom but also filter by what catches their interest. Jeziorski asked Segal to serve on his dissertation committee.
“He came to the U.S. by himself, very young, and he was able to achieve so much in a very short period,” Segal said.
During his PhD studies, Jeziorski spent one year studying at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics. Upon graduation, he spent a year as an assistant professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University before joining the Haas School in January 2012.
A ‘leading scholar of his generation’
As a researcher, Jeziorski became a leading expert in quantitative marketing, industrial organization, and the economics of digital markets. He published in several top-tier academic journals, served as associate editor of the journals Management Science and Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and sat on the editorial board of Marketing Science.
“Przemek was one of the most—if not the most—knowledgeable experts on empirical analysis in marketing in the world, so this is a tremendous loss to the field and to Haas, said Professor Miguel Villas-Boas, the J.Gary Shansby Professor and a colleague in the Marketing Group. “He was generous with his time, extremely caring about the Haas community, courageous to tackle important problems, full of grace and gentleness, and a loving father.”
One of his early and most-cited papers—published in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, examined mergers in the radio industry, finding strikingly different market effects for listeners and advertisers in terms of advertising rates, demand for different types of stations, and more. The study concluded that merger analysis that only focuses on a single side of a market might miss significant effects for consumers. More generally, the study broke significant new ground in measuring how changes in market structure can affect firms’ positioning strategies.
Over his years at Berkeley, Jeziorski became increasingly passionate about the role of marketing and business strategy for economic development and social impact, said Professor Ganesh Iyer, the Edgar F. Kaiser Chair in Business Administration and frequent collaborator. “Working with him was a joy—he always made me think harder and deeper about the problem on hand. He brought his innate curiosity and intellect to understand the impact of business strategies on the lives of the poor in developing economies,” Iyer said, referring to him as one of the “leading scholars of his generation” in his field. “He was especially driven by the business challenges facing the millions of small subsistence-level entrepreneurs across the world and the routes to improve entrepreneurial performance through financial inclusion and training.”
In a 2017 study co-authored by Nicholas Economides of NYU’s Stern School of Business, Jeziorski analyzed transactions of 1.4 million customers of the Tanzanian mobile company Tigo, reaching the surprising conclusion that customers were using the service not just for payments but to avoid theft. More than a third of the funds entering the system were transferred short distances—just a couple of kilometers—or they were stored for a few days before being cashed out.
“This means that the poor people of Tanzania are willing to pay Tigo as much as 7 percent to avoid being robbed when transporting money or just to store cash safe from relatives or burglars. Surprisingly, mobile money is seen as theft insurance by folks,” Jeziorski said in a press release.
“Working with him was a joy—he always made me think harder and deeper about the problem on hand. He brought his innate curiosity and intellect to understand the impact of business strategies on the lives of the poor in developing economies.”
—Professor Ganesh Iyer, Berkeley Haas
Jeziorski’s interest in financial inclusion led to a series of large-scale studies with Iyer on micro retailers in Kenya—vendors with sales of less than $100 a day. One study showed promising results from a low-cost, text-message-based business training program. A study with Mastercard and Unilever found that small borrowers often fail despite credit access due to overselling by sales representatives and lack of knowledge about using credit effectively. “Simply offering access to financial credit is not enough,” Iyer said. “It has to go hand in hand with the understanding of institutions and the knowledge frictions that small entrepreneurs face in poor economies.”
The two also collaborated on a paper on gender disparities facing female retail entrepreneurs, finding they benefit from training and development programs only when they have significant ownership of their shops and control over business decisions. “This research was really close to Przemek’s heart, given his intellectual curiosity about the determinants of gender inequality in entrepreneurial success,” Iyer said.
Jeziorski repeatedly traveled to Africa and India to have firsthand experience with the data he worked on. “He was truly adventurous,” Katona said. “He told me about a story where his rental car broke down in the middle of rural Tanzania, but he wasn’t deterred. He made friends with the local residents and got it fixed in no time.”
Another recent working paper, co-authored with former Haas professor Teck Ho—now president of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore—addressed concerns about overdiagnosis due to expanded breast cancer screening.
In addition to his academic work, Jeziorski is a co-founder of Keybee, a UC Berkeley SkyDeck startup that provides a data-driven solution to managing thousands of short-term rentals. He has also provided expert testimony in a number of litigation cases, including a landmark San Francisco opioid trial.
A lasting legacy
Jeziorski’s death is a huge loss for the school’s Marketing Group as well as for the larger university and his academic field. “Between his expertise and his scholarship and his teaching, it will be impossible to replace him,” Katona says. “If there is any consolation in these moments, it’s knowing the lasting impact that he left on so many people’s lives.”
“If there is any consolation in these moments, it’s knowing the lasting impact that he left on so many people’s lives.”
Professor Zsolt Katona, Berkeley Haas
“This loss is a profound tragedy that reverberates throughout the entire Berkeley community,” said Professor Panos Patatoukas, the L.H. Penny Chair in Accounting, a colleague and friend. “I am deeply shocked, and my thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends around the world.”
Jeziorski is survived by his mother, Alicja Jeziorska; his brother, Lukasz Jeziorski, both of Gydnia, Poland; and his two children, Zoe and Angelo. He was predeceased by his father, Marian Jeziorski, in June 2025.
The family has set up a fundraiser to help pay for costs associated with Jeziorski’s death.
Support resources
If you are processing this loss or any other, we encourage you to make use of support resources. A range of services are available to members of the UC Berkeley community. Counseling is available 24/7 through University Health Services at the Tang Center.
- Alameda County 24-Hour Crisis Line: 1-800-309-2131
- CAPS – Counseling & Psychological Services
- Dr. Don Capone – UC Berkeley Licensed Psychologist for Haas Students
- Faculty/Staff Employee Assistance
- Haas Prayer & Meditation Room (Cheit building, C122)
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