I'm not terribly surprised that the kind of dishonest research methods used in the social "sciences" and think-tanks have trickled down to marketing research firms that are contracted by companies to give them consumer data, since the kind of people staffing these companies came from the social "sciences" and work in said think-tanks etc.

But I do have to wonder, is providing a company with dishonest marketing research a breach of fiduciary responsibility? If I was an investor in a company that was making decisions based on dishonest research by a contractor, I'd wanna sue their asses. So I wonder if there's money to be made in working as essentially an auditor for these slimy marketing research firms.

I know that in the real sciences there's a growing trend among experienced researchers to audit studies in order to weed out junk research, since the journals themselves are too corrupt or indifferent to do their damn jobs, but these guys aren't getting rewarded for it, they're just genuinely fed up with the prevalence of junk research in their fields.

However, the possibility of suing a company for providing dishonest research, or suing a company for contracting with a company that does dishonest research, raises a possibility in this regard.

The corporate world already has math nerds in the form of accountants and actuaries, who they go to when they need real research and analysis done, rather than the kind of professional bullshitting that's always run rampant in marketing and advertising departments. So an enterprising law firm could potentially hire some of these math nerds to shred junk research and then offer investors an opportunity for a law suit.