Reservation Price Estimation by Adaptive Conjoint Analysis

Though reservation prices are needed for many business decision processes, e.g., pricing new products, it often turns out to be difficult to measure them. Many researchers reuse conjoint analysis data with price as an attribute for this task (e.g., Kohli and Mahajan (1991)). In this setting the information if a consumer buys a product at all is not elicited which makes reservation price estimation impossible. We propose an additional interview scene at the end of the adaptive conjoint analysis (Johnson (1987)) to estimate reservation prices for all product configurations. This will be achieved by the usage of product stimuli as well as price scales that are adapted for each proband to reflect individual choice behavior. We present preliminary results from an ongoing large-sample conjoint interview of customers of a major mobile phone retailer in Germany.