Special Session on Research Opportunities in Direct Selling: An Abstract

Direct selling is a vibrant component of the economic fabric of the United States, as well as globally. As such, it merits serious research attention from both a macro perspective (for example, a channel of distribution) and a micro perspective (for example, individual entrepreneurship). Moreover, the personal nature of direct selling, being based on a strong person-to-person interactive process, enables a variety of research endeavors that use direct selling to provide a vehicle or venue for data collection and testing hypotheses. Indeed, more than 150 peer-reviewed articles have been published on direct selling topics or have used direct selling data in research.