MARKETING RESEARCH REPORT

Research Report

In this assignment, you will engage with a primary source— a research article about consumer behavior from the academic literature. The goal of this assignment is 1) learn how to digest a research article 2) apply the insights to a business-relevant situation.

Choosing an article:

The article you choose needs to have the following characteristics. First, it needs to present original data. It cannot be a summary of previous work or pure theory— make sure the authors collected new data that is being presented for the first time. Second, the paper you choose needs to be well cited. Specifically, needs to be cited by at least 20 times on average for each year it has been published. Citation count can by searching on Google Scholar (Links to an external site.). For example, if a paper was published in 2015, it needs to have a citation count of at least 100. If a paper was published in 1990, it needs to have a citation count of at least 600. The citation count should be listed on the first page of your report. The results in the paper you choose should be plausibly replicable— do not chose a paper that would clearly not hold up to additional testing. The article does not need to explicitly mention consumer behavior.

[5 pts for meeting these criteria]

Written assignment:

Your research report must address the following issues:

· What is the key contribution of this research? 
[5 pts]

· Are there any confounds? Can you explain the results in a different way? [5 pts]

· Would the effect likely replicate? Use the criteria mentioned in class to evaluate the quality of the research [10 pts]

· What would you have done differently to test the hypotheses? [5 pts]

· What is the single most interesting future research direction? Just pick one. [5 pts]

· Describe a real world marketing-relevant situation where the findings could be applied in order to generate a novel solution [20 pts]

Length: Most successful papers will be between 6`7 pages. Use whatever amount of space is needed to efficiently communicate your ideas.