Surprising Robustness of the Self-Explicated Approach to Customer Preference Structure Measurement

Customized Conjoint Analysis combines self-explicated preference structure measurement with traditional full-profile conjoint analysis. The more important attributes for each respondent are first identified by the self-explicated approach. Full-profile conjoint analysis customized to the respondent’s more important attributes is then administered. The conjoint utility function on the limited set of attributes is then combined with the self-explicated utility function on the full set of attributes. Surprisingly, the self-explicated approach by itself yielded a slightly higher predictive validity than the combined approach.