The 2016 Ig Nobel Prize for economics was awarded to Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective.
They documented their research in the study “The Brand Personality of Rocks: A Critical Evaluation of a Brand Personality Scale,” Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson, Marketing Theory, vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 451-475.
The Otago Daily Times interviewed Shelagh Ferguson (with the headline “Otago University lecturer wins a Ig Nobel prize“), resulting in this video: