Comment by the_bear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_bear | Hacker News Reader

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My dad is an accounting professor, and while I don't think he normally involves undergrads in his research, it seems like he could. This is just one small segment of business research, but he tests how rules and incentives impact decision making.

For example, make a game where two people are teamed up. You give person A $10 and tell them they can give as much as they want to person B, and that's it. How much does person A share? Ok, now what if you give instructions explaining to person A that person B leaves empty handed if they don't share? What if you say that they're supposed to share 50%? What if 10% of whatever is given to person B is lost as a "tax"? The idea is to figure out ways to get people to act honestly and fairly in the hopes that it can be applied to business.

Undergrads could help find test subjects. They could help design the tests (they generally involve simple software that administers the games). Some could probably analyze the results in the hopes of finding interesting and unexpected takeaways.

That sounds more like Sociology.

As an aside, I believe my first post and this one could sound like I'm trying to be a dick, I'm honestly not. I am wondering and interested. Business majors and related (like your accounting professor father) always seemed to me to be more practical degrees and not really research fields.

Former Sociology Ph.D. candidate here.

Yes, a lot of b-school research crosses fields. I've worked with b-school profs doing work across sociology, economics, law (to a lesser degree), computer science, and mathematics. The difference between research in those fields and b-school research seems to be that the b-school profs had more of an applied bent. The b-school research was more motivated by practical business problems.

Of course, much like programs within a discipline can be radically different from university to university, I imagine there's also a range of research styles across b-schools.

Your impression is pretty accurate. Professional schools like business, social work, education or law do a weird mix of vocational courses and cross-disciplinary/applied work. The post you're responding to sounds more like behavioural eceonomics than sociology to me (it's the ultimatum game or a similar one) but you could do very similar research in psychology or in anthropology doing cross cultural comparisions of how people play this game. It has been and is being done.

I'm not familiar with accounting research but my impression is that there's quite a lot of overlap with some areas of microeconomics. After all, accounting is either about modelling and prediction or about accurate reporting and analysis if it's not to be book keeping.

Sometimes the cross-disciplinary/applied thing just means that garbage is published by people who aren't familiar with research in another field that covered the same ground decades before. The worst though is when something is researched, disproved and they keep on teaching it in these professional schools for reasons of ideology or politics. Stuff like Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences is still taught in Ed schools and researchers like Linda Gottfredson have to deal with witch hunts because they do work worthy of a real psychology department while in an Ed school. The perils of doing work on on intelligence in a political faculty.

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