Thirty Years of Conjoint Analysis: Reflections and Prospects

Conjoint analysis is marketers' favorite methodology for finding out how buyers make trade-offs among competing products and suppliers. Conjoint analysts develop and present descriptions of alternative products or services that are prepared from fractional factorial, experimental designs. They use various models to infer buyers' part-worths for attribute levels, and enter the part-worths into buyer-choice simulators to predict how buyers will choose among products and services. Easy-to-use software has been important for applying these models. Thousands of applications of conjoint analysis have been carried out over the past three decades.