Conducting Research in Marketing with Quasi-Experiments

Abstract

This paper aims to broaden the understanding of quasi-experimental methods among marketing scholars and those who read their work by describing the underlying logic and set of actions that make their work convincing. The purpose of quasi-experimental methods is, in the absence of experimental variation, to determine the presence of a causal relationship. First, the paper explores how to identify settings and data where it is interesting to understand whether an action causally affects a marketing outcome. Second, the paper outlines how to structure an empirical strategy that allows the author to identify a causal empirical relationship. The paper details the application of various methods to identify how an action affects an outcome in marketing, including difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, instrumental variables, propensity score matching, synthetic control, and selection bias correction. The paper emphasizes the importance of clearly communicating the identifying assumptions underlying the assertion of causality. Last, the paper explains how exploring the behavioral mechanism—whether individual, organizational, or market-level— can actually reinforce arguments of causality.

Field experiments in operations management

“…As such, internal validity is a major concern in the quasi‐experiment design because the non‐random assignment may lead to discrepancies in its treatment, or in that of control groups. Consequently, additional techniques such as propensity score matching and synthetic control analyses are necessary to alleviate the concern regarding confounding bias (Goldfarb et al, 2022). Nonetheless, a quasi‐experiment design has its advantages over other types of experiments, mainly because researchers have direct control over the treatment assignment, and the experiment is typically easier to set up, especially in settings where randomization is impractical or unethical.…”

Looking Ahead: ANZMAC’s Pivotal Role for Marketing Scholars Downunder

“…Topics that come to mind are text mining for marketing insight (e.g. Berger et al, 2020), webscraping (Boegershausen et al, 2022), addressing endogeneity concerns in marketing (Papies et al, 2017), quasi-experimental methods in marketing (Goldfarb et al, 2022), meta-analysis (Melnyk et al, 2021) and methods for developing indigenous marketing theory (Zeithaml et al, 2020).…”

Societal Spillovers of TV Advertising: Social Distancing During a Public Health Crisis

“…In other words, COVID-19-related ads would have a limited role in increasing salience when salience is already high. We conduct analyses that allude to the potential mechanism by exploring heterogeneous advertising effects through moderation analyses (Goldfarb, Tucker, and Wang 2022). We use two measures of salience at the county level: county-level policy interventions and pandemic-related keyword search interest (Google Trends).…”