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.
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)
Max, I don't think that price anchoring and group thinking are necessarily arbitrary to look at in conversation, I think you just need to justify WHY they're important to look at together or prove that they're somehow competing or mutually exclusive.
ReplyDeleteI really like the strategies that you have for starting to compile sources. As you get closer to a more refined topic, you'll need to start to come up with a more specific strategy.
Max, I honestly don't know whether you're funny or if you're turning into Yash (sorry Yash ☺). I think you're on the right track when it comes to your lit review and annotated bibliography though, so great job. In terms of your topic, all of your options are really solid and I know that all of them interested you. Maybe you could narrow down your choices a little by thinking about possible methodology? Or maybe choose the topic that has the least written about it? I don't think you have to choose between price anchoring and group thinking if you're set up concrete connections between the two, but you would need to be careful about word count. Overall, I think you're almost exactly where you need to be right now and you have some good ideas regarding how to move forward, so great job.
ReplyDeleteHey Max, long time no see! Anyways, I love/hate the title of this blog post (but I cant complain because I basically used your Syria idea for my Seminar paper during the actual test last year). Honestly your methods for trying to build your works cited and lit review are solid so I'll focus more on the things you felt like you had questions on.
ReplyDeleteSo, narrowing down your topic... I remember sitting next to you and having you turn to me every three minutes showing me some paper you found that had a ridiculously good idea or subject matter, but just as I had assumed, you are stuck on the ones you talked most about that day: age groups, time pressure, and group think. Just like you, I find all of these to be interesting so I'll just talk through them all to see if I can help you out.
Okay so age groups. In all honesty, and I think you might recognize this as well, I don't think you really have as strong of an interest in this as the other two. In my opinion, just since you aren't as interested in this one, I would drop it, otherwise you will be miserable come February.
Time pressure in decision making is honestly the one that I thought you would go with, just because your eyes lit up when you mentioned it to me, and lets be honest, we both thought it was a really cool idea. But then you found group think, and well, we couldn't really decide. I think no matter which route you take, you will be really happy with either of these two, but if you can find a way to combine the two through your lit review and are able to show the significances of both topics in modern day behavioral economics, I think you would have found exactly which topic you want to look into. Something that you should stay aware of, however, is that neither of these two are completely independent variables, and they could have impacts that build upon each other. Something you might want to look at is "does the speed of which the group decides to price or buy a product affect how the individual prices the product". That combines both your topics and honestly would be really cool to look at. In the end, however, I think the biggest problem you might face is finding a way to have precise and standardized variables for any experiments that you run. Overall, I hope this kind of pushed you in the direction that I think you were already going in and keep up the good memes and work!
BTW I saw your Syria response for section II last year.
DeleteI like your insight that they're not "completely independently variables" and your suggestion to marry the two. Again, make sure when you bring two variables together that they actually belong.
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