Balancing the use of behavioral research and design science research to solve the relevance problem in marketing research

Contemporary marketing research has a value problem. Claims for the managerial impact of research appear in practically every research article. Nevertheless, managers in the field do not consider scientific outputs as relevant in helping them to address the multiple challenges that organizations face. Marketing typically conducts behavioural research, aiming to understand and explain real-world problems. Other disciplines, such as engineering, focus primarily on building solutions to solve practical problems. Such practice is often termed design science. This study proposes that marketing research should focus more on building solutions, hence calling for a better balance between behavioural and design research. An improved balance between these two paradigms in marketing should increase the value of academic research to practice. Four typical case studies are presented to illustrate key differences between design science and behavioural science

The problem of relevance.

My project is a systematic inquiry into the problem of relevance, which has been identified as an enduring difficulty in, for example, informal logic and information science where it plays a fundamental role in argument and information searches, respectively. My first task involves determining exactly what the problem of relevance is. To achieve that, I collected problem statements from the literature but I also analysed literature on relevance to discover further problems. The key problem that I investigate concerns the question, \u27What is relevance?\u27, which I take to concern the meaning and occurrence of relevance. Concerning the semantic question, I suggest that it demarcates a point of time prior to asking it. Subsequently, I identified and evaluated approaches to elucidating the notion of relevance, rejected intuitionism and stipulation as suitable approaches, and selected philosopher/physicist Mario Bunge\u27s approach to scientific philosophy and his conceptual system to frame my study. I also assess potential information sources; rejected constructed examples that prove to be contrived or are used to illustrate a stipulated definition; and selected dictionary definitions, actual statements, and carefully constructed examples as information sources to complement my review of the literature on relevance. To elucidate relevance, I traced the concept back to its Greek roots, analysed statements, and concluded that the term \u27relevance\u27 since its inception in Scottish law in the early 1500\u27s has been limited largely to relations of significance. Understanding relevance in terms of both connection and significance is crucial to construct, identify, or evaluate relevance statements and thereby develop a representative theory of relevance. It also provides a solution to many controversies such as degree of relevance and it helps elucidate notions such as strength and sufficiency of an argument. I suggest that as significance can vary in degree, so too can relevance but a connection between objects is presupposed in both cases. Strength is a measure of significance and sufficiency is the strength required to establish a conclusion. Finally, I offer a provisional and partial theory of relevance where I summarize my prior analyses and integrate/comment on published positions on relevance

Invariance under complex transformations, and its relevance to the cosmological constant problem

In this paper we study a new symmetry argument that results in a vacuum state with strictly vanishing vacuum energy. This argument exploits the well-known feature that de Sitter and Anti- de Sitter space are related by analytic continuation. When we drop boundary and hermiticity conditions on quantum fields, we get as many negative as positive energy states, which are related by transformations to complex space. The paper does not directly solve the cosmological constant problem, but explores a new direction that appears worthwhile.Comment: Some clarifications and references adde

Knowledge and reasonableness

The notion of relevance plays a role in many accounts of knowledge and knowledge ascription. Although use of the notion is well-motivated, theorists struggle to codify relevance. A reasonable person standard of relevance addresses this codification problem, and provides an objective and flexible standard of relevance; however, treating relevance as reasonableness seems to allow practical factors to determine whether one has knowledge or not—so-called “pragmatic encroachment.” I argue that a fuller understanding of reasonableness and of the role of practical factors in the acquisition of knowledge lets us avoid pragmatic encroachment

On the local extension of Killing vector-fields in Ricci flat manifolds

We revisit the problem of extension of Killing vector-fields in smooth Ricci flat manifolds, and its relevance to the black hole rigidity problem

Revisiting the Tag Relevance Prediction Problem

Traditionally, recommender systems provide a list of suggestions to a user based on past interactions with items of this user. These recommendations are usually based on user preferences for items and generated with a delay. Critiquing recommender systems allow users to provide immediate feedback to recommendations with tags and receive a new set of recommendations in response. However, these systems often require rich item descriptions that contain relevance scores indicating the strength, with which a tag applies to an item. For example, this relevance score could indicate how violent the movie "The Godfather" is on a scale from 0 to 1. Retrieving these data is a very demanding process, as it requires users to explicitly indicate the degree to which a tag applies to an item. This process can be improved with machine learning methods that predict tag relevance. In this paper, we explore the dataset from a different study, where the authors collected relevance scores on movie-tag pairs. In particular, we define the tag relevance prediction problem, explore the inconsistency of relevance scores provided by users as a challenge of this problem and present a method, which outperforms the state-of-the-art method for predicting tag relevance. We found a moderate inconsistency of user relevance scores. We also found that users tend to disagree more on subjective tags, such as "good acting", "bad plot" or "quotable" than on objective tags, such as "animation", "cars" or "wedding", but the disagreement of users regarding objective tags is also moderate.Peer reviewe

Relevance, Choices, and the Goldilocks Problem

Ms. Whisner ponders a core question in answering reference queries: How can we know whether what we find is relevant to what the questioner wants? Her article provides criteria to consider and some guidelines for choosing sources in response to a query

Equal Educational Opportunity for Children With Special Needs: The Federal Role in Australia

A control engineering benchmark problem with industrial relevance is presented. The process is a simulation model of a nonlinear four-mass system, which should be controlled by a discrete-time controller that optimizes performance for given robustness requirements. The control problem concerns only the so-called regulator problem