Search Results (20)

Self-driving vehicle (SDV) safety and reliability are becoming critical design parameters as SDVs increase their market share. This paper examines public preferences for key SDV safety features (system reliability, sensor resilience, failure behavior, and driver alert methods) using a choice-based conjoint survey of 403 U.S. respondents. A novel integration of conjoint analysis with Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression and generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLMMs) was applied to identify the most influential features and their demographic or behavioral predictors. Results show that multimodal driver alerts (i.e., audio + visual) were the most influential factor, accounting for nearly two-thirds of decision weight. System reliability (i.e., low human intervention rates) and sensor resilience (i.e., low tolerance for failures) were secondary, while failure behavior had minimal influence. Subgroup analyses revealed modest variations by willingness to pay for SDVs, income, race/ethnicity, marital status, education, driving frequency, and risk propensity, though the importance of alerts and reliability remained consistent across groups. This combined conjoint-LASSO-GLMM framework enhances the precision of preference estimation and offers actionable guidance for SDV manufacturers seeking to align safety feature design with consumer expectations. Full article

As carbon taxes gain traction in climate policy, public support remains limited. The purpose of this study was to investigate how different mineral oil tax designs, particularly those combining rebates and earmarking, affect public acceptance, and whether the effects are monotone. The data were based on an online survey that was conducted in 2022 in Austria (n = 1216). It was found that a tax increase of EUR 25-cents per liter is politically feasible if revenues are earmarked for public transport or climate protection and paired with moderate rebates. Other uses of revenue, especially the general budget, fail to achieve majority support, regardless of tax level or compensation. To capture non-monotonic and heterogeneous preferences, an adaptive-choice-based-conjoint experiment with hierarchical Bayesian estimation was employed. Rebates were modeled as a stand-alone attribute, allowing for the identification of non-monotonicities for this attribute. The findings show deviations from widespread monotonicity assumptions: a moderate tax increase (EUR 10-cent/liter) was preferred over no increase, even in the absence of earmarking. Similarly, larger annual rebates (EUR 200–300) reduced support compared to a EUR 100 rebate, which was most popular. Full article

Insects have been proposed as a sustainable protein alternative to conventional meat sources. However, consumer acceptance of edible insects is still low in the Western Hemisphere. This study examined how product characteristics and consumer beliefs influence the liking and willingness to try cricket-based food products. An online survey was conducted in the province of Alberta, Canada. Alberta is a major site for beef production and plays a vital role in Canada’s agricultural and economic landscape. Participants (n = 548) were asked to indicate their overall liking (OL) and willingness to try (WTT) a cricket-based snack in a conjoint analysis experiment. A 2 × 2 × 5 design was used for the product characteristics (type of product, presence of an image of the product, and product benefit claims). Each participant was assigned five product profiles using a balanced incomplete block design. The type of product (cricket chips and whole roasted crickets) was the most important attribute for participants. Product benefit claims did not effectively increase the OL or WTT of the cricket-based snacks. Higher scores on the Entomophagy Attitude Scale and previous experiences consuming insect-based food products positively influenced WTT and OL. The findings of this study underscore the significance of the type of product and personal attitudes towards entomophagy in shaping consumer preferences for sustainable protein sources and offer valuable insights for the development and marketing of insect-based food products in a Western market where meat products are accessible and affordable for many. Full article

Background/Objectives: To map and analyze patient expectations regarding communication in IC and identify communication that both heightens anxiety in the IC process and reduces anxiety in the IC process before surgery. Methods: Ethics approval was granted. A power analysis indicated a required sample of 90 patients. A conjoint-based experimental design was performed, post-discharge, overcoming typical biases of surveys. Results: The sample comprised 104 patients who underwent surgery in the last year. Three verbal communication messages were perceived as significantly decreasing pre-operative anxiety for the total sample. Mathematical clustering yielded three distinct mindsets. Post hoc ANOVA indices indicated that the mindsets were significantly different. Patients belonging to each mindset differed from patients belonging to other mindsets in their expectations from the dialogue with surgeons to mitigate their anxiety. Mindset 1 (70% of the sample) comprised patients who expected information that was tailored to their specific situation. To feel safer, they needed to know that nothing unexpected would happen. Mindset 2 (13%) comprised patients who expected providers to talk with them about benefits and risks at the clinic, not at the hospital, and have a dialogue with them. Mindset 3 (17%) comprised patients who perceived a lack of information regarding the purpose of signing the informed consent and lack of sufficient time to thoroughly read the form or signing the form minutes before the procedure as elements that would heighten their anxiety. Conclusions: Three verbal communication messages in the IC dialogue were thought to decrease pre-operative anxiety for all patients, as follows. “I want to make sure you read and understand the consent form entirely” “Everything is provided in clear and simple terms”. The surgeon says, “Let’s go over the entire form”. Full article

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the sudden shift of the interactions between students and teachers from the four corners of the classroom to fully online learning through the workstations. By using a conjoint analysis approach, this study aimed to evaluate the preference of undergraduate students from the Philippines on the workstation design attributes during the pandemic. Seven attributes were examined through orthogonal design: the type of gadget, keyboard, mouse, earpiece, desk, kind of chair, and light device. Through a purposive sampling approach, a total of 315 undergraduate students from the Philippines were gathered. Through an online survey with two holdouts, the respondents voluntarily responded to 51 stimuli produced by IBM SPSS using a 7-point Likert scale. Type of gadget (37.925%) was found to be the most significant attribute preferred by the students, followed by the type of mouse (28.345%), kind of chair (14.840%), type of keyboard (7.548%), earpiece (7.177%), light device (2.109%), and desk (2.056%). It is worth noting that the preferred workstation design combination is the personal computer, mechanical keyboard, wired mouse, headset, height-adjustable table, high-back office chair with neck support, and floor lamp. This study is the first to use a conjoint technique to examine undergraduate students’ preferences for workstation design attributes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, by applying the attributes and design developed in this study, the conjoint method can be used and expanded to evaluate the workstation design attributes of other courses and even employees worldwide. Full article

The beer industry is one of the businesses affected during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the exponential growth of the beer industry throughout the years, this aspect of the beverage industry has gained limited attention and has been underexplored. This study aimed to provide a better and up-to-date understanding of Philippine-beer consumers to speed up its recovery. An online survey with 853 volunteer respondents was conducted to investigate Filipinos’ local beer consumption considering frequency, intake, expenses, and preference. A descriptive analysis of the consumers’ self-perceived evaluation of the changes in drinking showed a slight decrease in frequency, intake, and expenses and a minor change in preference. Somers’ d and the chi-squared test results indicated significant relationships between each demographic information (age, sex, and income) and frequency, intake, and expenses. In addition, a conjoint analysis with an orthogonal design indicated that price was the most important attribute (58.025%), followed by primary taste (12.452%), alcohol content (9.706%), mouthfeel (6.445%), aftertaste (6.355%), aroma (5.189%), and, lastly, color (1.827%). The findings of this study could be used as a baseline for improved product offerings, customized advertisements, and market segmentation. Moreover, the results of this study could be applied and extended by breweries to promote and create strategies. Lastly, this study could be extended and utilized by other beverage industries worldwide. Full article

Project Managers (PMs) working in competitive markets are finding Project Management Information Systems (PMISs) useful for planning, organizing and controlling projects of varying complexity. A wide variety of PMIS software is available, suitable for projects differing in scope and user needs. This paper identifies the most useful features found in PMISs. An extensive literature review and analysis of commercial software is made to identify the main features of PMISs. Afterwards, the list is reduced by a panel of project management experts, and a statistical analysis is performed on data acquired by means of two different surveys. The relative importance of listed features is properly computed, and the interactions between the respondent’s profiles and PMIS features are also investigated by cluster and respondents’ analyses. The paper provides information for researchers and practitioners interested in PMISs packages and their applications. Furthermore, the analyses may help practitioners when choosing a PMIS, and also for developers of PMISs software in understanding user needs. Full article

As public perception about the shared economy evolves, peer-to-peer ridesharing has been gaining increased attention worldwide. Both private and public sector entities have launched mobile app-based ridesharing services, while a range of methodologies and system architectures have been proposed in academia. Whereas traditional ridesharing methods match drivers and riders when their origin and destination are similar, recently proposed algorithms often feature multi-hop and multimodal properties that allow riders to be connected by multiple modes. Such algorithms can reduce travel time and/or travel cost; however, they may also add other travel impedances, such as requiring multiple transfers. Understanding user behavior toward such new ridesharing systems is essential for successful service design. For policymakers and service planners, identifying factors that impact traveler choices can lead to better design and improved services. This research involved a web-based survey to capture traveler preferences using a conjoint analysis framework. A choice-based method was adopted to identify factors for the estimation model and to analyze traveler willingness to pay. Among the proposed factors, the number-of-transfers was shown to be the most important, as was expected. When a multimodal ridesharing system provides less travel time, low travel cost, and sufficient ridesharing incentive, people are more likely to pay for the service. Full article

Sustainability in sports tourism has increased in recent years. Sustainability is a particular focus for diving tourism. This paper analyses the meaning of sustainability to German speaking diving tourists to draw conclusions for the development of tourism strategies. Based on a literature review on the importance of sustainability in diving tourism, an empirical study was designed to understand the importance of the topic within the target group. A total of 174 German-speaking diving tourists were surveyed using an online-questionnaire. The subjects were clustered regarding their sustainable behavior. It could be shown that there is a correlation between age as well as gender and sustainable behavior. A conjoint measurement showed that for diving tourists, ecological aspects are more important than the prize of a diving trip. The gained insights can contribute to establish new and more sustainable offers in diving tourism and thus developing this area of sports tourism more sustainably overall. Full article

Sandwiches are the most common “casual-food” consumed by all age groups in Spain. Due to the importance of visual appearance to promote unplanned or impulse buying, foodservice and hospitality companies focus on improving the visual impression of their food menus to create an expectation that satisfies both sensory and hedonic consumer experiences. To provide a list of attributes about the visual appearance of sandwiches, 25 students were recruited from a university and were invited to participate in two nominal group technique (NGT) sessions. To understand whether a sandwiches’ appearance can influence the expectation of consumers, 259 participants completed an online survey specially designed from the results of the NGT sessions. Data were analyzed using conjoint, internal preference mapping and cluster analysis; the interaction effect by gender was also studied. The conjoint results indicate that visual perception about the filling (vegetal or pork based) plays the most key role overall in consumer expectation. When consumers choose vegetables as the filling, the consumers’ perceived sandwiches as healthier, but the pork filling was perceived as more attractive and satiating. Interaction effect by gender was observed in filling when females perceived pork filling as less healthy than vegetable. By acceptance, consumers were segmented into three groups. The first cluster (n = 80) selected the pork filling. The smaller group (cluster 3, n = 36) prioritized the vegetal filling, and the most numerous cluster 2 (n = 140) liked sandwiches with multigrain bread. These results may help companies to build tailor-made marketing strategies to satisfy consumer segments. Full article

Identifying key welfare issues for thoroughbred racehorses could lead to an improvement in standards. A lack of scientific information on the relative importance of key issues was addressed by soliciting the views of, first, welfare experts in the industry and, second, a broader group of stakeholders, who selected the best welfare options by adaptive conjoint analysis. The experts represented racehorse breeders, veterinarians, trainers, owners, government officials, salespeople, farriers, transporters, and horse re-trainers for post-racing activities. In a focus group meeting, the experts identified fourteen key welfare issues, each with two to four levels that related to common husbandry practices. Then, in an internet survey, 224 stakeholders ranked the issues using adaptive conjoint analysis, in declining importance, as: horsemanship > health and disease > education of the horse > track design and surface > ventilation > stabling > weaning > transport > nutrition > wastage > heat and humidity > whips > environment > gear. Relatively uniform responses to the survey by the different stakeholder groups suggested that there was a common view on what had the biggest impact on welfare. An exception was a greater rating given by women than men to the importance of correct horse nutrition. The rating of importance for welfare of different levels of provision of each issue mostly conformed to the scientific evidence, with the exception of weaning. This understanding of the importance of welfare issues for thoroughbred racehorses could be used to target interventions to the most serious problems. Full article

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. Full article

Research on the influence of packaging on consumer perception of beer and other alcoholic beverages suggest an important role in capturing consumers’ attention and generating expectations on perceived product quality, and in particular that color, bottle shape, and label design are key aspects. There is, however, a paucity of research looking at interactions between different aspects of packaging design. This is a topical issue given an increasingly saturated market where especially craft breweries strive for differentiation and brand recognition. Situated within this context, the present research used a conjoint analytic approach to investigate the effect of packaging design on consumer perceived quality and liking for beers. Beer images were designed to systematically vary in four design factors—label color, label shape, label complexity, and bottle shape—and evaluated in an online survey with a representative sample of Danish beer drinkers. Two of the design factors—label color and bottle type—significantly affected consumers’ product evaluations, whereas the other two factors did not. Post-hoc analyses of the main effects indicated that the combination of a “Bomber” bottle shape and a warm color scheme in the label as the optimal combination of design factors to maximize consumer preferences. Preference for the Bomber bottle was linked to a perceived premiumness associated with a preference for curvatures (as opposed to angularity), whereas the preference for warm colors was tentatively explained as due to crossmodal correspondences generating favorable sensory expectations for this color scheme. Full article

The government of Afghanistan promotes saffron production as a means to achieve economic development while reducing the widely spread opium cultivation in the country by providing necessary support to its farmers via saffron farmer service centers. This study investigates the causal effects of relevant attributes of potential saffron production promotion policies on the participation probabilities of saffron farmers. This study applies a randomized conjoint experiment to primary survey data of 298 farmers in Herat Province, which is perceived by the government as the center of saffron production in the country. The proposed hypothetical saffron production promotion policy consists of six attributes, namely, provision of machinery equipment, weather-based crop insurance, accessibility to long-term loans, location of saffron farmer service centers, provider of services, and annual payment. In the randomized conjoint experiment design, the respondents rank two alternative policies and policies against the status quo. The desirable policy comprises the machinery provision, long-term (up to 5 years) loan accessibility, an easily accessible service center, and policy implementation by international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The estimated results reveal that saffron farmers are highly supportive of the proposed saffron promotion policy and that their willingness to pay is as high as 17% of their per capita income. Full article

This paper proposes an approach that combines data envelopment analysis (DEA) with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and conjoint analysis, as multi-criteria decision-making methods to evaluate teachers’ performance in higher education. This process of evaluation is complex as it involves consideration of both objective and subjective efficiency assessments. The efficiency evaluation in the presence of multiple different criteria is done by DEA and results heavily depend on their selection, values, and the weights assigned to them. Objective efficiency evaluation is data-driven, while the subjective efficiency relies on values of subjective criteria usually captured throughout the survey. The conjoint analysis helps with the selection and determining the relative importance of such criteria, based on stakeholder preferences, obtained as an evaluation of experimentally designed hypothetical profiles. An efficient experimental design can be either symmetric or asymmetric depending on the structure of criteria covered by the study. Obtained importance might be a guideline for selecting adequate input and output criteria in the DEA model when assessing teachers’ subjective efficiency. Another reason to use conjoint preferences is to set a basis for weight restrictions in DEA and consequently to increase its discrimination power. Finally, the overall teacher’s efficiency is an AHP aggregation of subjective and objective teaching and research efficiency scores. Given the growing competition in the field of education, a higher level of responsibility and commitment is expected, and it is therefore helpful to identify weaknesses so that they can be addressed. Therefore, the evaluation of teachers’ efficiency at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Organizational Sciences illustrates the usage of the proposed approach. As results, relatively efficient and inefficient teachers were identified, the reasons and aspects of their inefficiency were discovered, and rankings were made. Full article