Breaking It Down

Hello All:
Today's blog post will focus on how I have chosen to break down my topic into subtopics. But before I can talk about that, I have to say what my topic actually is. After a week of research and quibbling over what variable I should test and what topic to choose, I have finally decided to focus on the effects of arbitrary price anchors, random numbers and signals, on people's decision-making during time pressure situations. There is a lot of research that currently shows people think more irrationally in time pressure situations and there is even some research on pricing decisions in time pressure situations, but nothing specifically on price anchoring and time pressure. The connection is important because in many real-life situations consumers are exposed to time pressure and are simultaneously exposed to subtle cues, or price anchors. So analyzing the two together explicitly will help consumers, companies, and behavioral economists understand the relationship. I also plan to standardize the group of people I test it on in order to get more consistent and credible results, but that it something I can focus on in my methods section.
So now that I have a topic, I can start dividing it into subtopics for me to research. Currently my project has two obvious large subtopics, price anchoring and time pressure effects, so I will start by dividing it into those. But both of those subtopics are still large and complex topics, so I will need more subtopics to help me in my research and writing my literature review. I plan to look into time pressure decisions as one subtopic. While my research will be specifically on price decisions, other time pressure decisions, such as those involving risk, are still made by similar parts of the brain. And much research shows that regardless of the decision, time pressure will play a role. I also plan to look at pricing decisions specifically and research on that. Then by using these subtopics in conjunction, I can create a cohesive and well-evidenced literature review. I will also look into price anchoring through different subtopics. One important thing for me to look into will be how price anchoring affects consumers' decisions on specific goods. Many price anchoring studies use many goods and look into consumer decisions on each individually. So by looking into that, I can make a better decision about how I go about my own experiment and also I can understand how specific goods change consumer decisions. Finally, I will look into the different environments that price anchoring effects occur in and how the environment changes price anchoring effects. This may seem irrelevant to my topic, but it is vital for me to understand, since the environment will affect my experimental design and also my results.
I think that through looking into these topics, I will be able to make a cohesive literature review and I will be well-equipped for my research moving forward. (493)

My Syria-ous Topic Crisis (tbt AP Seminar)

Hello All:
At the beginning of the week, I was very set on what I wanted to do. I wanted to pursue behavioral economics and more specifically price anchoring effects and how they varied with age. For anyone who does not know, price anchoring is when a random number or outside influence changes someone's willingness to pay a certain price for a certain item. After I read a research paper on price anchoring, I went to the works cited page and started going to the different cited articles, since I figured they would be similar in topic and academic. But what I failed to recognize is that the paper I read compiled many sources on topics that I found extremely interesting but were not directly related to what I was looking for. I read articles on time-pressure decision making and group decision making and was fascinated by both of those topics. So after browsing the web for a class period, I went from very sure of what I wanted to do to very unsure of which of my options to choose. I was feeling a little like Mr. Krabs.

So I took a step back and asked myself how I could possibly combine some of the topics I am interested in. I came up with a combination of group decision making and price anchoring; I wanted to see if price anchoring or group thinking was more powerful. But after a discussion in class, I was told/realized that I was trying to make things fit together that did not necessarily and that I was trying too big a scope for the class. So now I have a few options for my topics that I would enjoy. I am thinking about either doing price anchoring in relation to changing age groups (as I originally planned), how time pressure affects pricing decisions, or how group thinking affects pricing decisions, especially if one member is different from the rest of the group (i.e. older). Hopefully I can make a decision in the coming days and get on track to having a great research project.

For all of my topics, I will begin the literature review/annotated bibliography process by looking on JStor and EBSCO with key words like price anchoring, group decisions, and time pressure decisions. I will see what I find and I will continue to refine my search. I have also found a few free behavioral economics journals with accredited papers and PhD authors, so I will look on those to find more specific papers in the behavioral economics field. I also plan to use the cited works from papers I read to find other papers that I should be familiar with relating to my topic. Through these methods, I plan to complete my literature review over the next few months and a meaningful and interesting research paper over the next year. (482)

Refining My Research Topic

Hello all:
For those of you who do not know me my name is Max Rosenberg and I am currently a Senior at BASIS Scottsdale taking AP Research. I came into the class with an idea of what area I wanted to pursue, but I did not know the specifics of where my project was headed. I also came into the class with a few goals for my AP Research experience. My first goal is to create a complete product, meaning that I want to have some conclusive and quantifiable findings from my research. MY second goal is to have fun and pursue something that I find extremely interesting. Finally, my third goal for my research is to produce something that has real world applications. For me, real world applications does not necessarily have to entail doing research for a company or creating a product that is ready for use, but rather it means that my research and findings can be read and applied in both an academic and professional setting.
As I mentioned earlier, I came into AP Research with a topic in mind for my research project: behavioral economics, specifically price anchors or branding. Since I already had a starting point, I started refining my topic by looking at behavioral economics papers. I read a paper on price anchoring and am currently reading a paper on branding. I have found in my reading so far that both price anchoring and branding have significant research databases for me to use. That is both a positive and a negative. The large database is good because it gives me a lot of material for my literature review and shows that price anchoring and branding are significant within the field of behavioral economics, but the large database may leave little room for me to do new research. However, in my reading thus far I have noticed a lapse in the data: nobody is researching the effects of price anchoring and branding on different age ranges. The gap in research may provide me with a very interesting question that is also relevant in both an academic and business setting. In the coming week, I plan to do more research and refine my question further, but right now, I think I have a good starting point for an interesting and fun year of AP Research. (391)