Choosing Multiple Items from a Product Class

By Leigh McAlister
1978| Working Paper No. 447

By focusing on consumer preference for single items, marketing research has implicitly assumed that product choices are made independently of each other. For many product classes (e.g., magazines, stereo albums, liquors in a home bar) that assumption is implausible. Balancing or rounding out a group of items implies that there is dependence among selections. Models incorporating this, dependence are constructed and tested.