- Landing page: this page allows you to provide the name of the project along with key information, such as project number, fieldwork information, and your team contact details. You can include your client’s logo as well as images of key product concepts or other key material that might have been shown to respondents during the interview.
- Sample weighting: this is usually required if the sample is not representative of the Universe due, for example, to a boosted or to a quota sample. Weighting improves representativeness. Weights computation can be done with your favourite statistical of tabulation software or you can use the powerful and flexible RIM weighting functions provided within our package R-sw-Discriminant. Once computed, respondents weights can simply be copied and pasted onto the worksheet Weights of the simulator.
- Product Share Calibration (PSC): the developer can easily specify PSC coefficients in order to calibrate the stated current shares for the market players against the actual market shares for the players, thus any under/over sampling of product usage can be accounted for. Future shares are adjusted accordingly.
- Share > 100%: usually, individual products have got a share smaller than 100% and the total share of the modelled products is equal to 100%. However, in some circumstances (e.g., co-prescribing in healthcare market research), it might be necessary to model a total share larger than 100% or to model classes of products rather than individual products. As a class of products is made up by multiple products, such class could receive a share larger than 100%. The R-sw Conjoint Type B simulator can handle both these cases.
- Juster Probability Coefficient Calibration (JPC): the potential future uptake (preference share) is typically affected by overstatement in any conjoint study. Acceptance of an overstated share can have significant impact for an organisation, so it is important to adopt an effective approach to adjust an overstated share to a more realistic level. The adoption of the Juster 11-point purchase probability scale allows reducing the share for the new product/s and adequately re-assigning the difference to the other players. This calibration approach is also available separately within our packages R-sw-Conjoint and R-sw-Discriminant.
Step-by-Step guide to amend a Type B Simulator
- Review the landing page (worksheet mainOutput) and add the team contact details for the project and your/your client logo;
- load the individual conjoint coefficients (estimated by R-sw Conjoint) into the simulator (sheet UTL.0) and run the ready-to-use macro CoefficientsScoresReformat to transform them into individual conjoint utilities (sheet UTL.1);
- add, if required, the individual weights (worksheet Weights);
- add, if available, the Juster assessments of the new product on the 11-point purchase probability scale (worksheet JPC);
- add the individual segment information (e.g., region, respondent type, etc.) so that the relevant respondents can be selected via the drop down menu (worksheet Filters1);
- run the ready-to-use simulator macros to obtain importance scores (macro ImportanceScoresCreate) and zero-centered utilities (macro UtilitiesScoresCreate);
- review the help pages by replacing the screenshots and by adapting the explanatory notes;
- change the simulator graphics (buttons’ colors and dimensions, background color, font type and size, etc.) by entering new parameters at the worksheet ‘index’.