Measurement of preferences with self-explicated approaches: A classification and merge of trade-off- and non-trade-off-based evaluation types

Self‐explicated approaches are popular preference measurement approaches for products with many attributes. This article classifies previous self‐explicated approaches according to their evaluation types, i.e. trade‐off‐ versus non‐trade‐off‐based, and outlines their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, it proposes a new method, the presorted adaptive self‐explicated approach that is based on Netzer and Srinivasan’s (2011) adaptive self‐explicated approach and that combines trade‐off‐ and non‐trade‐off‐based evaluation types. Two empirical studies compare this new method with the most popular existing self‐explicated approaches, including the adaptive self‐explicated approach and paired comparison preference measurement. The new method overcomes the insufficient discrimination between importance weights, as usually found in non‐trade‐off‐based evaluation types; discourages respondents’ simplification strategies, as are frequently encountered in trade‐off evaluation types; is easy to implement; and yields high predictive validity compared with other popular self‐explicated approaches.