MKTG 7815 - Philosophy, Theory Development, and Research Methods

This seminar is designed to give business PhD students an understanding of philosophy of science, theory construction, and empirical tests of theories. The first objective of this seminar is to provide an understanding of philosophy of science. Philosophy of science exposes and questions critical assumptions and methods of science that help us answer some of the most significant questions about scientific knowledge. Like what is knowledge, how is it created, how can it be scrutinized and validated, how does it gain acceptance, why is it always changing. As a creator of scientific knowledge, philosophy of science also nudges students to reflect upon their activities and motivations as a scientist. The second objective of this seminar is to train students in theory construction from idea generation, hypothesis development, to theory development. The discussion will incorporate abstract concepts of theory construction and their application in published research. It is designed to provide students an understanding of how to connect their specific research ideas to different research streams that already exist. After developing theory, the next critical step is its empirical test. The third section of this seminar will focus on analysis methods that can be used to assess how valid is the empirical support for a theory. We will discuss methods such as experimental design, diff-in-diff, regression discontinuity design, power analysis, effect size testing, regression. Theory testing using machine learning methods will also be discussed. Many times such methods are taught across various courses and prevent researchers from seeing how they can be easily used in their research papers.