IJMR New Writer Award finalist: Making conjoint behavioural
Leigh Caldwell
The Irrational Agency
Conjoint and the behavioural challenge
Conjoint analysis has been a trusted tool of market researchers for decades. Since being developed in the 1960s by Paul Green (Green & Rao 1971), and refined with choice-based conjoint and adaptive conjoint (Johnson 1987) in the 1970s and 1980s, it has provided the ability for researchers to measure the value placed on product attributes by respondents.
The algorithms used in conjoint are elegant and statistically robust – but unfortunately they are measuring something that doesn’t exist. One of the developers of...