Abstract:

One of the most important responsibilities of decision makers and also of research managers, including marketing and social research managers as well, is to select the best research projects among alternative ones to be undertaken. To determine the best project, at least three dimensions should be used. In other words, each research project should be evaluated on these three dimensions, namely validity, reliability and cost. The best project is the one which has the highest validity and reliability at the same cost or the lowest cost at the same level of validity and reliability. Validity and reliability are the scientific measures of the quality of the project. This paper intends to demonstrate a very useful approach to evaluate alternative research proposals. In this content, different forms of Bayesian decision analysis will be briefly demonstrated and a more practical and valid procedure to evaluate research proposals will be presented.