Estimating the Market Share for New Products with a Split Questionnaire Survey

Abstract

When designing a new product, conjoint analysis is a powerful tool to estimate the perceived value of the prospects. However, it has a drawback: when the product has too many attributes and levels, it may be difficult to administrate the survey to respondents because they will be overwhelmed by the too numerous questions. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach that permits us to bypass this problem. Contrary to conjoint analysis, which estimates respondents’ utility functions, our approach directly estimates market shares. This enables us to split the questionnaire among respondents and, therefore, to reduce the burden on each respondent as much as desired. However, this new method has two weaknesses that conjoint analysis does not have: first, inferences on a single respondent cannot be made; second, the competition’s product profiles have to be known before administrating the survey. Therefore, our method has to be used when traditional methods are less easily implementable, i.e., when the number of attributes and levels is large.