Call for Research Proposals: Modeling Mobile Customer Behavior

seeking research proposals that will stimulate new thinking and impactful research on "Modeling Mobile Customer Behavior." We anticipate awarding 4-8 grants ranging from $2,000-$10,000 to support high-quality empirical research.

Call for Research Proposals: Modeling Mobile Customer Behavior

The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI) is seeking research proposals that will stimulate new thinking and impactful research on "Modeling Mobile Customer Behavior." We anticipate awarding 4-8 grants ranging from $2,000-$10,000 to support high-quality empirical research on critical questions in this area. Authors of winning proposals will be invited to present their work at an event at the Wharton School in early 2012.

No one can deny the explosive impact that mobile devices have had on consumers, managers, public policy officials, and other kinds of decision makers. This dramatic growth in mobile activities has led quite naturally to a corresponding torrent of granular data that capture these behaviors. Whether mobile device users are communicating with others, consuming digital content, acquiring information, alerting others to their location, engaging in transactions, or posting content to be consumed by others, they are creating an "electronic trail" that lends itself to modeling and analysis. Some of these behaviors can be analyzed using well-established methods, but others will require the development of new statistical approaches. But whether applying/extending old methods or creating new ones, this research competition is about shedding new light on this emerging source of rich behavioral data.

It is ironic that mobile activities have changed our lives, but published papers on such topics have been relatively scarce to date. We hope that this call for proposals will spur on many new projects in this important area, and help shape research standards that will guide future activities for years to come. Likewise, we want to reflect and influence leading-edge practices by firms that are already "betting their futures" on behavioral patterns that have already been observed or are being hypothesized/predicted. Overall, we hope that this CFP and the conference that will follow will help researchers and managers find some genuine common ground in the area of mobile behavior; thus we will look for potential practical impact of the work as one of the criteria in judging the proposals.

We invite empirically-oriented research proposals that will offer substantive insights about mobile customer behavior while also advancing marketing science and practice. Successful proposals will be financially supported by WCAI, and working papers resulting from these projects will be published in the WCAI Research Paper Series.

Topics

Managerial challenges that led to the decision to launch this research competition include the following:

The interplay among mobile activities (e.g., communicating, consuming/upload content, purchase-related activities, etc.).
How mobile usage interacts with other related media (e.g., television, laptops, print publications) - complementarity vs. substitution effects.
Usage patterns for downloadable apps. The role of mobile in the "conversion funnel" for purchasing big-ticket items.
The evolutionary use of mobile payment systems for routine purchases.
How firms combine mobile with other data sources to gain a "360" view of customers' preferences and behavioral propensities.
Understanding social network activities that are enabled by mobile devices.
The use of geographic information about mobile users.
Valuation of mobile customers and optimal resource allocation across them.
Optimal pricing for mobile services.
"Real-time" targeting of ads and other content.
The role of third-party app developers in the success of a mobile platform.

These are just a few initial thoughts to stimulate thinking about possible research projects in this area, but we encourage creative (and relevant) ideas that are not covered in this list. In cases where the appropriate data are unavailable to the researcher, WCAI will make every attempt to find suitable corporate "data donors." We encourage researchers to make such requests, but we offer no guarantees that we can fulfill them.

Evaluation

Proposals will be evaluated by the following review team:

Eric T. Bradlow, Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative
Peter S. Fader, Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative
Elea M. Feit, Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative
Anindya Ghose, New York University
Jacob Goldenberg, Hebrew University

Dates

Research proposals are due by April 22, 2011, and funding decisions will be announced by May 30, 2011. The conference at Wharton will be held in early 2012. All researchers submitting proposals, whether chosen to present or not, are encouraged to attend; it will be a unique opportunity to exchange ideas about research on mobile behavior with other like-minded academics and highly engaged practitioners.

SUBMISSION PROCESS

Proposals should be emailed to Elea Feit, Research Director, Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, efeit@wharton.upenn.edu, 248.444.4892. Please indicate that your submission is in response to this call. While there are no formal guidelines for formatting proposals, submissions should include:
1. A one-page summary
2. A clear statement of the expected contribution, such as a new framework or methodology, a better understanding of how key variables affect marketing processes, or new information to assist managers in making better marketing decisions
3. A brief review of the relevant literature and a statement of how the proposed research is expected to contribute to knowledge and improve business practice
4. A list of research questions or hypotheses describing the issues to be studied, the researchers' initial insights or beliefs, and what should be learned from the study
5. A detailed description of the proposed research design, methodology, model to be used, analysis plan, data, etc. (Methodological details will play a critical role in the evaluation process.)
6. A timetable, including dates for key research milestones, deliverables, and an expected completion date
7. Funding or support needs (typically, an itemized budget)
8. Vita(e) of the researcher(s), and contact information for each author
9. Proposals must be no more than 8 double-spaced pages; however the summary, vita(e), and appendices/exhibits will not be counted toward the page limit.

Please feel free to include as appendices any additional materials that might be useful to the reviewers in evaluating your proposal (for example, drafts of research materials, questionnaires, more detailed explanations of statistical analysis, and/or modeling plans, lengthy literature review, detailed development of hypotheses, description of datasets to be used, etc.).