Insegnamento a.a. 2015-2016

Go to class group/s: 23

BIG (3 credits - II sem. - OB  |  SECS-P/08)

Course Director:
THOMAS EICHENTOPF

Course Objectives

Marketing research is the art of understanding how people make decisions. For good policy makers, such skills are just as crucial to design and evaluate new policies. Therefore, this course explains qualitative and quantitative tools as we commonly use them in marketing and help students to apply them to the political domain. For that purpose, lectures are interactive: students analyze typical problems, select and apply statistical techniques to investigate empirical data, and identify relevant managerial conclusions. Furthermore, the course devotes reasonable space to discuss nudging as a political tool that recently grew to prominence.

Course Content Summary

• Identifying and analyzing marketing research problems in public policy.
• Designing research projects.
• Collecting and using different types of data (internal vs. external, primary vs. secondary).
• Analyzing public policy data with appropriate (multivariate) statistical techniques.
• Explaining and transferring results to practitioners in public policy.
• Understanding benefits and conditions of various research strategies.
• Discussing recent trends and ethical constraints of marketing research for public policy.

Detailed Description of Assessment Methods

For Attending students:
During the course, students prepare a number of assignments with real data to experience the typical process of a (marketing) research project. Furthermore, one written exam concludes the course. The exam determines 40% of the final grade, while the assignments accounts for the remaining 60%. Students can earn bonus points through active participation to the class.
Assignments (60%): In order to establish a collaborative atmosphere, at least some assignments require students to work in small groups. Assignments typically require students to work with empirical data that have a connection with public policy.
Final exam (40%): The exam covers materials from the textbook, classroom discussions, and other materials provided to the students throughout the course. The exam format is a mixture of standardized and open questions and the focus is on the application of marketing research in an empirical context (i.e. public policy).

For Non-attending students:
Final exam (100%): The exam consists of an individual written test with standardized and open questions that will cover all the mandatory literature.

Textbooks

• N.K. Malhotra,  Marketing Research – An Applied Orientation,Pearson Prentice Hall,2009, 6th edition , (Chapters 2-4, 6-9, 14-17)
• Optionally: R.H. Thaler, C.R. Sunstein , Nudge – Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Yale University Press, 2008 , (Chapters 1, 4 to 6, 11, 13, 17).

For Non-attending students additionally: optional reading is mandatory.

Exam textbooks & Online Articles (check availability at the Library)

Prerequisites

This is not a course on statistics, but students should feel advised to have a basic understanding of key statistical concepts, i.e. multivariate statistics and linear regression models, which we use throughout the course.

Last change 12/05/2015 17:04