5-Day CurriculumFull Curriculum

5 Presentations

8 Supplemental Readings

5 Exercises

20 Work Hours

This is a suggested curriculum for technically capable graduate students, appropriate for a graduate-level market research, econometrics, or multivariate methods course. The purpose is to introduce students to conjoint analysis and CBC and give them insight into the mechanics of experimental design. Each student may conduct a primary research project using Sawtooth Software’s Discover-CBC software service and market simulator (completely free for learning purposes, see Academic Subscriptions). Each lecture is accompanied by a set of readings and subsequent exercises that should take about 2 hours each to complete. The primary research project (including software training, data collection, data analysis, and report) should take about 4-10 hours to complete.

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Day 1: Intro to Conjoint Analysis and Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC)

Student Readings:

Lecture:

Student Exercises:

Access the sample CBC survey on food preferences at a baseball game (http://www.sawtoothsoftware.com/baseball) and complete the questionnaire. Answer the questions realistically, to reflect your opinions and preferences. At the end of the interview, the website displays how often you chose each food item, each wait time, and each price level. It also shows results for all respondents who have completed the survey to this point.
Which variable has more average impact on respondents’ choices, wait time or price? How did you come to this conclusion?
Examine the demand curve table (two-way counts, food item x price) and line chart displayed for the total sample, showing how often all respondents chose each food item at each price. Using the log-log regression method of estimating price elasticity, compute the price elasticity of demand for each food item.
Finally, referring to the two-way counts table (food item x price) and assuming that the prices of all other food items remain constant, which price should be set for each food item to maximize its relative revenue? (Hint: relative revenue is computed as relative demand x price). What other aspects would need to be considered if the goal were to set prices to maximize profit?

5-Day CurriculumFull Curriculum

Day 1: Intro to Conjoint Analysis and Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC)

Student Readings:

Lecture:

Student Exercises:

Instructor Aids: