Incorporating patients’ preferences into healthcare decisions has been identified as one mechanism for reducing health disparities. Some research suggests that providers need to tailor medical recommendations to the preferences of their patients. Yet there are few tools to facilitate clarification of preferences for health services. This paper reports the process of testing an innovative prefer...

A common trade-off in product design is form versus function. While function is typically analyzed and understood quite well, user preferences for the visual shape of a form are not. Product shape has become an increasingly important market differentiator, and so the need for better shape preference analysis has also increased. Conjoint analysis and PREFMAP are preference assessment techniques ...

This paper re-examines the discrete choice methods and stated preference elicitation procedures that are commonly used in choice-based conjoint analysis. The aim is to clarify their domains of applicability and provide reliable techniques for data collection and analysis. CONTENTS Topic Page Preface 2 1 Choice Behavior and Consumer Welfare 2 1.1 Utility 5 1.2 Choice Probabilities 8 1.3 Consumer...

Conjoint analysis is one of the most important tools to support product development, pricing and positioning decisions in management practice. For this purpose various models have been developed. It is widely accepted that models that take consumer heterogeneity into account, outperform aggregate models in terms of hold-out tasks. The aim of our study is to investigate empirically whether predi...

We develop a framework within which robust models of preferences are computationally efficiently estimated using quadratic optimization methods. Within this framework general highly non-linear models can be computationally efficiently estimated while at the same time avoiding overfitting problems that such models typically have. We compare these models with standard logistic regression and rece...