Reference no: EM132402845

Experiment Proposal Assignment

Overview. Each individual student submit a brief proposal for an experiment that addresses a topic in consumer behavior.

Initial Experiment Proposal Assignment: Your proposal should address the following points:

1. What general topic or research question would this study address? (Example: improving consumer satisfaction)

2. What prediction or hypothesis do you have? (Example: people are happier in situation X than in situation Y even though their objective outcome is equivalent in the two situations because they have different reference points.)

3. What methods do you propose? Be as specific as you can here. Remember that our study is going to be an on-line survey, so that methods have to be things we can do in an on-line survey. Presenting hypothetical scenarios and asking respondents what they would decide would work fine. Giving participants actual foods to eat, however, would not work for this study. If you are proposing that we present participants with some scenarios, write a draft of a scenario or two that we might use.

4. What is the experimental design? That is, what will you be experimentally manipulating? (Example: presenting a low vs. high reference point before offering people a choice between X vs. Y. The reference point would be the experimental manipulation.) Your proposal needs to be an experiment, not a correlational design. Your experimental variable cannot be a participant level variable (e.g., gender, income, race).

How many different groups of subjects will we need for the study design? What will each individual subject see, and what response will they be asked to give? Within- or between-subject comparison?

5. What results do you expect if your hypothesis is correct? You might draw a graph here with made-up numbers that show the results pattern you expect. (Example: happiness ratings will be high for the scenario with the low reference point compared to the one with the high reference point.)