Article ID: | iaor20082927 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 26 |
Issue: | 5 |
Start Page Number: | 596 |
End Page Number: | 610 |
Publication Date: | Sep 2007 |
Journal: | Marketing Science |
Authors: | Hauser John, Garcia Rosanna, Toubia Olivier |
Polyhedral methods for choice-based conjoint analysis provide a means to adapt choice-based questions at the individual-respondent level and provide an alternative means to estimate partworths when there are relatively few questions per respondent, as in a Web-based questionnaire. However, these methods are deterministic and are susceptible to the propagation of response errors. They also assume, implicitly, a uniform prior on the partworths. In this paper we provide a probabilistic interpretation of polyhedral methods and propose improvements that incorporate response error and/or informative priors into individual-level question selection and estimation. Monte Carlo simulations suggest that response-error modeling and informative priors improve polyhedral question-selection methods in the domains where they were previously weak. A field experiment with over 2,200 leading-edge wine consumers in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand suggests that the new question-selection methods show promise relative to existing methods.