ESTIMATION OF ATTRIBUTE IMPORTANCE BY CHOICE TIME IN A RANKING TASK

Abstract

The evaluation of the quality of products and services as a function of their attributes has been broadly implemented in marketing research. The current methods for identifying important attributes and prioritize them suffer from theoretical and practical limitations. The former are related to the choice of the most appropriate model for the specific experimental context, the latter are due to the large amount of variables (cognitive, context and survey variables) affecting the chosen model. This work aims at presenting a new method for capturing consumer attribute preferences and estimating the relative importance weights by using the choice time in a ranking task. All is made through an easy computer interface, purposely developed. The method allows overcoming most of the problems with context, survey and cognitive variables. A validation of the method is provided through the results of a real case study concerning cellular phones.