16. Conjoint Measurement Analysis
Conjoint Measurement Analysis plays an important role in marketing.
In the design of new products it is valuable to know which
components carry what kind of utility for the customer. Marketing and
advertisement strategies are based on the perception of
the new product's overall utility.
It can be valuable information for a car producer
to know whether a change in sportiness or a change in safety equipment
is perceived as a higher increase in overall utility. The Conjoint
Measurement Analysis is a method for attributing utilities to the
components (part worths) on the basis of ranks given to different
outcomes (stimuli) of the product. An important assumption is that the
overall utility is decomposed as a sum of the utilities of the
components.
In Section 16.1 we introduce the idea of
Conjoint Measurement Analysis. We give two examples from the food and car
industries. In Section 16.2 we shed light on the problem of designing
questionnaires for ranking different product outcomes. In Section 16.3
we see that the metric solution of estimating the part-worths
is given by solving a least squares problem. The estimated preference
ordering may be nonmonotone. The nonmetric solution strategy takes
care of this inconsistency by iterating between a least squares solution
and the pool adjacent violators algorithm.