Monday, 17 September 2012

Team B, 17th Sept'12, session 21-22



Author: Vivek Agarwal
             11020841119
                         Team B

Conjoint analysis is a statistical technique used in market research to determine how people value different features that make up an individual product or service.

The objective of conjoint analysis is to determine what combination of a limited number of attributes is most influential on respondent choice or decision making. A controlled set of potential products or services is shown to respondents and by analyzing how they make preferences between these products, the implicit valuation of the individual elements making up the product or service can be determined. These implicit valuations (utilities or part-worths) can be used to create market models that estimate market share, revenue and even profitability of new designs.

Conjoint analysis techniques may also be referred to as multi-attribute compositional modeling, discrete choice modeling, or stated preference research, and is part of a broader set of trade-off analysis tools used for systematic analysis of decisions. These tools include Brand-Price Trade-Off, Simalto, and various mathematical approaches.

Consumers examine a range of features or attributes and then make judgements or trade-offs to determine their final purchase choice. Conjoint analysis examines these trade-offs to determine the combination of attributes that will be most satisfying to the consumer. By using conjoint analysis a company can determine the optimal features for their product or service.

Using conjoint analysis, we can calculate which factor has a high utility value. Utility can be defined as a number which represents the value that consumers place on an attribute. In other words, it represents the relative "worth" of the attribute.

The importance of an attribute can be calculated by examining the range of utilities (that is, the difference between the lowest and highest utilities) across all levels of the attribute. These ranges tell us the relative importance of each attribute.a

A product or service area is described in terms of a number of attributes. For example, a television may have attributes of screen size, screen format, brand, price and so on. Each attribute can then be broken down into a number of levels. For instance, levels for screen format may be LED, LCD, or Plasma.

As the number of combinations of attributes and levels increases the number of potential profiles increases exponentially. Consequently, fractional factorial design is commonly used to reduce the number of profiles that have to be evaluated, while ensuring enough data are available for statistical analysis, resulting in a carefully controlled set of "profiles" for the respondent to consider.

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