Modeling Diversified Preference for Flowers

1. Introduction With the maturity of the consumers' life, its importance is growingly recognized to measure and characterize their diversified preference of consumers. Here, we extend Thurstone's classical model (1927) expressing the discrimination of two stimuli and develop a unified maximum likelihood procedure. It can analyze various types of preference test and effective when fairly a large number of objects are examined. In such cases, the preference test becomes inevitably incomplete. As a case study, we carried out experiment to examine the preference of 191 N = students (subjects) for 20 H = varieties (objects) of violet. The experiment consisted of paired comparisons by sixty slides, four-fold comparisons by twenty slides, and choice-of-three-out-of-eight comparisons by twenty slides. Pretest showed that these experiments require six seconds, eight seconds and thirty seconds per slide respectively.