1. Behavioral prosumer index in the New Economy
This summer internship project, hosted by the Chaire Technologie, Durabilité et Société (TDS) at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC), focuses on advancing the Prosumer Behavioral Index (BPI), a novel measurement tool designed to capture the active role of consumers as value creators in contemporary markets. With the rise of digital platforms and applications, consumers increasingly engage not only in purchasing, but also in redistributing, lending, producing, repairing, maintaining, and exchanging products, materials, and services with other consumers and organizations. These practices, referred to as prosumption, challenge conventional marketing assumptions and call for renewed theoretical and managerial perspectives on the consumer’s role in market systems. The project aims to refine, test, and further validate the BPI as a robust instrument for assessing prosumer behaviors across different contexts. The intern will contribute to activities such as literature review, scale refinement, questionnaire development, data collection, statistical analysis, and interpretation of results. Particular attention will be given to the implications of prosumption for sustainability, including product lifetime extension, maintenance and repair, resource recirculation, and circular economy practices. This project offers strong interdisciplinary value at the intersection of marketing, consumer behavior, digital transformation, and sustainability. It will provide the intern with advanced research training in measurement development and quantitative analysis, while contributing to cutting-edge knowledge on alternative forms of exchange and the evolving role of consumers in sustainable markets. The expected outcomes include stronger empirical validation of the BPI, academic dissemination, and actionable insights for organizations seeking to better integrate prosumer dynamics into innovation and sustainability strategies.
Research area, student roles & skills
Research area: This project will be directed by Myriam Ertz, full professor in marketing with a specialization in modeling consumer behavior as well as in consumer analysis. She is also interested in all the new forms of the trading, producing, and hence, prosuming capacities of consumers, namely autoproducing, swapping/bartering, donating, reselling/recommercing, lending, leasing, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and sharing, which will be the subject of this research. The project will be essentially under the supervision of Myriam Ertz, who could also oftentimes be joined by colleagues at the LaboNFC and Chaire TDS.
Student roles:
The student will play an active and collaborative role in supporting the advancement of the Prosumer Behavioral Index (BPI) developed at the Chaire TDS, UQAC. Working under supervision, the intern will contribute to both the conceptual and empirical stages of the project.
First, the student will assist with a focused review of the literature on prosumption, consumer-to-consumer exchange, circular economy practices, and sustainable consumer behavior in order to help strengthen the theoretical foundations of the index. Second, the student will participate in refining the dimensions and indicators of the BPI by helping assess the relevance, clarity, and coherence of items used to capture prosumer behaviors such as lending, redistributing, producing, repairing, and exchanging products or services.
The student will also support the design of research instruments, including survey questionnaires and related documentation, and may assist in preparing data collection materials. During the empirical phase, the intern will contribute to data cleaning, coding, preliminary statistical analyses, and interpretation of findings. Depending on the student’s profile, this may include descriptive analyses, reliability assessment, exploratory factor analysis, and other quantitative tasks related to scale development and validation.
In addition, the student will help synthesize results for research reports, presentations, and academic outputs. Throughout the internship, the student is expected to demonstrate rigor, autonomy, curiosity, and strong analytical skills, while also engaging constructively with the research team.
Overall, the role is designed to provide the student with hands-on training in consumer research, sustainability-oriented marketing, measurement development, and quantitative analysis, while making a meaningful contribution to an innovative project examining the evolving role of consumers as active market participants.
Skills required:
The student must be enrolled in a program in business administration: management, marketing, finance, or data analytics. The student should be familiar with marketing and consumer behaviour concepts. The student must me motivated to do scientific research, having a nice pen in English, and high autonomy, sense of initiative, efficiency and synthesis. Some experience in literature review, marketing research including developing and programming questionnaire, as well as data analysis will be considered valuable advantages.