If you’re still having trouble deciding on your own research topic, it may be helpful to contemplate the many simple facts of daily life that defy logic, or don’t accomplish what they intend, or seem peculiar until we understand their underlying motives.

SEAT LICENSING FEES.
I understand season tickets to ball games, orchestra series, concert venues, even time-shares. There’s a tangible return for the investment: guaranteed viewing rights or the promise of familiar accommodations. But the “seat licensing fee,” often well into five figures, for the right to continue to purchase season tickets! That’s just magnificent madness. Somebody should be promoted to genius for that concoction, and then shot for audacity. Does the license entitle you to see that games? No! You still ahve to buy tickets for that. Instead, the only thing licensed is the “right of first refusal” to buy the seats when they’re offered for sale. Nevertheless, nutty as it seems, for most participants, these turn out to be good investments and truly valuable commodities that can be resold for big profits.

VIRTUAL REAL ESTATE.
Understandably, you may have no interest in “Second Life,” but since we’re talking about the imaginary qualities of money, how about this incomprehensibility? Second-Lifers pay fake “money” to “buy” fake real estate in this entirely fake universe where muscular avatars roam and live out their fake lives. I don’t know much about the mechanics of the transactions, but I do know in recent years real-world investors have started paying real-world currency to buy these fake plots from fake developers who have somehow managed to transcend the ephemeral nature of Second Life and create “value” others are willing to pay for. Can you get a mortgage from a real-world bank to buy them? I don’t know, but it’s worth a research paper.

CERTIFICATES OF AUTHENTICITY.
These just seem completely counterintuitive to me. Maybe I’m missing something. I’m shopping for sports memorabilia, say, or “official” NFL gear, a hat, if you will, or a used hockey puck, or a collectible coin. All of these items can be counterfeited, have been counterfeited, are often counterfeited, and people get taken all the time by buying fake items. It’s hard to understand why anyone would care, but who am I to judge? I’m sure I’m just as nutty about something. But, I ask you, how does the Certificate of Authenticity reduce the odds of being ripped off? I mean, really, if you can make a convincing baseball cap, how hard would it be to counterfeit a Certificate of Authenticity? And why does anybody trust that the certificate actually applies to the item it’s packaged with? Interesting enough to investigate?

KILLER PRODUCTS.
When is it a good time to tell customers your product can kill them?

Stock prices for the big four US cigarette makers soared the day after the government settled its case against them and levied billions of dollars of fines. The terms of the settlement forced the companies to stop advertising their products in magazines. The companies cannot show people smoking on billboards. They must of course post ever more frightening messages directly on their packages, warning customers exactly what sorts of painful cancers they are buying. The companies are even required to fund an independently-produced big-budget ad campaign, “The Truth Campaign,” promoting anti-smoking messages of all kinds. Yes, these are paid for by the cigarette companies. And yes, stock prices soared when the details of the settlement were released. Did the ban against cigarette ads work? The links might get you started.

KILLING GOOD IDEAS.
How is it possible that business leaders who specialize in killing good ideas succeed, sometimes phenomenally?

They do so by recognizing that even the best ideas are sometimes doomed by development costs or market reluctance. Which would be more interesting as a research topic: following the history of the splendid failures of products that should have worked but never caught on? or the example of an idea that was turned down repeatedly before it finally found its way to market? (I once heard a story of an inventor who wanted to vend hot cheese snacks directly from machines. He got to market eventually, but the product he ended up selling is more like a pretzel bite stuffed with cheese, and a cold one.) On the other hand, Steve Jobs‘s willingness to shoot down brilliant ideas is legendary, and perhaps the key to his success (unless you consider the iPad a pretzel bite).

CHEAP PLAYERS MAKE A BETTER TEAM.
Billy Beane was a very highly-paid prospect his first year in baseball but never performed as expected. Then he figured out why. He’d been paid on the basis of irrelevant statistics.

When he became the GM of the Oakland As, he applied ground-breaking statistical analysis tools to his job of building a team through trades and acquisitions. Among his counterintuitive insights: players who make more errors are often better fielders than players who don’t. They’re catching balls that would have been scored hits. When they miss one and are charged an error, it’s often a ball inferior fielders wouldn’t have tried to field (and wouldn’t have been penalized for missing). For pitchers, wins are irrelevant; strikeouts are not. For batters, what matters is OBP, not BA. Beane built his team by bargain-shopping players other teams undervalued. A classic of counterintuitive thinking from the sports world. The story is now a movie called Moneyball. The statistical analysis method used to make the counterintuitive selections is called Sabermetrics.