Prof Amitav Chakravarti NAB 5.13

This course is compulsory on the MRes/PhD in Management (Marketing). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

The course objective is to familiarize students with research in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and marketing on information processing and judgment and decision making related topics to better understand and develop marketing strategies that affect consumer behavior. There are two main aims of this course: (1) to give students a strong foundation for critical thinking in the area of consumer behavior, and (2) to enable students to conceptualize, develop and operationalize research ideas. Therefore, the focus is on understanding current theoretical and methodological approaches to various aspects of consumer behavior, as well as advancing this knowledge by developing testable hypotheses and theoretical perspectives that build on the current knowledge base. This means that students have to actively read prior research in different areas – try to understand the authors’ ideas and develop the habit of constructive criticism of the research. To encourage this habit, the role of author of certain papers may be assigned to some students in the class and the role of reviewer assigned to others.

30 hours of seminars in the MT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay and 1 essay in the MT.

• Higgins, E. T., & Kruglanski, A. W. (Eds.). (2007). Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.

• Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain, Edward E. Smith, Columbia University, Stephen M. Kosslyn, Stanford University, 2007  | Pearson

• Bazerman, Max H. (1994), Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, John Wiley & Sons.

• Russo, J.E. and P.J.H. Shoemaker (1989), Decision Traps, Doubleday.

• Thaler, Richard H. (1992), The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life, Princeton University Press.

Essay (40%, 2500 words), essay (40%, 2500 words), essay (5%, 1200 words), essay (5%, 1200 words), essay (5%, 1200 words) and essay (5%, 1200 words) in the MT.

Participants will be required to (a) write 4 short, 2-page critiques of a paper from the reading lists in order to demonstrate their understanding of an area/topic, and (b) develop 2 new research ideas (throughout MT) that will help participants advance the current state of knowledge. An additional preliminary critique paper and research idea paper will be used as formative assessments.

The latter two new research idea papers, weighted 40% and 40% respectively, will be used as the summative assessment components. The balance 20% of the grade will be based on the last 4 short, 2-page critiques of specific papers in the reading list.