What is the difference between ACA and CBC?

Last Updated: 08 Mar 2019Hits: 10429

What is the difference between ACA and CBC in the term of accuracy? I’ve read the manual and noticed that each had totally different features. But the problem is that I didn’t get the exact point of them. My survey will have 4 or 5 attributes, with 4 or 5 levels per attribute, and approximately 100 respondents.

You can read about some of the advantages and disadvantages of the different methods of conjoint analysis in our paper: Which Conjoint Method Should I Use? (2013)

Adaptive Conjoint Analysis (ACA) and Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC) are both perfectly capable of getting accurate estimates of respondents’ part-worth utilities. They are simply different methods of getting people’s preferences. ACA is an adaptive, ratings-based approach that will show people partial profile cards for ratings based tradeoffs. CBC is a full profile choice based method that will ask people to select their favorite concept in a set of concepts.

If pricing research is a big part of your studies then I would definitely favor CBC over ACA. With only five attributes you should be able to do a CBC study, even with only 100 respondents. If you are concerned about sample size then ACBC does better with small samples then CBC.