It is an unfortunate fact of academic life that you need a grant to complete your study. Take a look at studies that come out of HBS or Stanford GSB; more often than not they are sponsored by big banks and investment firms.
I do feel as uncomfortable about this as you do. This sort of sponsoring ruins academic objectivity.
There is no need for grants in top b-schools. Whereas other academic departments pay faculty 9-months out of the year, even third-tier b-schools will pay for 2/9 or 3/9 of your salary in the summer if you publish just about anything.
Larger studies? No problem, the dean has you covered. The brilliance of b-schools is that they can mint $ with certificates and exec Ed, all of which is available to them at low overhead (namely the university collects a lesser cut).
It's preposterous to believe that faculty at the very top need to whore themselves out to industry for funding. What they will do to get their hands on data, however, is unspeakable. Yelp, Dropbox, eBay, etc. are merely providing data to the researchers, and more often than not, they have a say on what gets published. The truth always does eventually come out (e.g. negative company information) but it does so behind conference/seminar doors, not in print.
I do feel as uncomfortable about this as you do. This sort of sponsoring ruins academic objectivity.