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|  SS Winter 2011Sawtooth Software Conference 2012 AnnouncedWe are pleased to announce that the 2012 Sawtooth Software Conference will be held March 21-23, 2012, at Disney’s Boardwalk Inn in Orlando, Florida. This conference is held only once every 18 months. Given this location and the success of our last conference, we expect between 225 to 250 people for the 2012 conference.
Orlando International Airport is convenient to most major airports, including from Europe. Based on past experience when we hold this event on the East Coast, we expect many of our European colleagues to join us. Disney’s Boardwalk Inn has the advantage of being just 20 minutes from the airport (with free airport shuttle service if arranged in advance with the hotel). The hotel has a premier location just a few minutes walk from Epcot theme park, and within easy boat/bus transportation of the other Walt Disney World theme parks. The registration fee will be $1,050 for the 2.5-day conference, plus $250 per optional tutorial (attendees may sign up for up to two optional tutorials). We have secured a promotional room rate of $205 with Disney’s Boardwalk Inn. Optional workshops and tutorials will be March 19-20, and the main conference sessions will run from March 21-23, 2012. So, mark your calendars and put it into your 2012 budget! A call for papers will be issued in July. To get a feel for the quality of the presentations given at previous conferences, you can download free copies of the written conference proceedings at http://www.sawtoothsoftware.com/education/techpap.shtml. Menu-Based Choice (MBC) Beta on the HorizonMany of you have been following our R&D efforts on a relatively new conjoint technique called Menu-Based Choice (MBC). What distinguishes typical MBC questionnaires from CBC questionnaires is that respondents pick from zero to many items (attributes/features) on the menu and “build” the desired product (such as with choosing from a menu at a restaurant). Many products and services are sold via menus, where buyers can choose among a la carte and pre-bundled options.We are progressing nicely with software development, and hope to release a beta version at about the end of Q2. We’ll be inviting interested beta testers to attend one of the upcoming training events. Please note that using MBC software requires much more knowledge than our standard conjoint software. Perspective beta testers should be advanced CBC users, with significant experience in conjoint design and econometric modeling (especially dummy-coding/effects-coding of design matrices). Get a preview of what we’ve accomplished with MBC so far by downloading a preliminary copy of our MBC documentation at http://www.sawtoothsoftware.com/download/mbcbooklet.pdf. The documentation will also be made available soon as a free paperback booklet. MBC software is designed for analyzing simple to complex discrete choice and multi-check menu tasks. It will come with a market simulator, including the availability of a simulator that may be delivered to clients. (MBC software will not have a survey-writing component; all survey writing and data collection is done using other software tools, such as Free Format questions within SSI Web, paper-based data collection, or data collection on a third-party survey system). MBC will be able to analyze data from a variety of simple to complex choice questionnaires:
Already about 100 of you have placed your names on the list of interested parties, and we’ve been communicating regularly with you regarding development plans and MBC issues. Thank you for your insights and support so far! Beta Tester Details: The beta test program is planned to last about 9 months. All beta participants must attend an MBC training event. At the time of printing, we have not finalized the meeting times and venues. We are hoping to conduct at least three events during Q2 and Q3: probably two on the East Coast and one likely in London. Please check our website for updates, at http://www.sawtoothsoftware.com/workshops.shtml. Online Market Simulator: Easier to Use, Attractive InterfaceDesigned for efficiency and simplicity, the new simulator is geared towards researchers and clients that want a quick, easy way to set up and run market simulations and summarize utilities and importance scores. To begin using the simulator, simply go to www.sawtoothsimulator.com and click "Sign Up for an Account". The new tool is a web-based platform, allowing you and your clients access to data 24-hours a day. Because it is web-based, you'll have instant access to the latest improvements in the software. You'll also be able to store all your analysis projects in one place, conveniently switching between projects. The system allows you to set up individual client sub-accounts, granting them access to their projects while maintaining the confidentiality of your other clients. You can customize which of the reporting aspects are available to your client (utilities, importances, and simulations) and hard-set the simulation settings. You can customize a very clean and simple interface for your client. For example, this customized dashboard (below) only shows simulation results and a utility report (no importance report is shown).
When a person clicks Define Products, the following is shown:
When you click Run Simulation, the simulation report is displayed:
Features:
Pricing: Administrator accounts are just $50 per 30-day period, allowing you to create, analyze and store as many projects as you wish for as long as you own your account. Client accounts are also $50 per 30-days for each client username/password you set up. Each client account can also have an unlimited number of analysis projects associated with it. You must pre-pay for the online simulator. Funds are attached to your administrator account, which is debited every 30 days for the upcoming period, and as you add users. For more information, and to set up your simulator account, please visit http://www.sawtoothsimulator.com. (Click "Sign Up for an Account") More for Less: Annual Subscription LicenseDoes Sawtooth Software sell a bundled package of software at a steep discount? Yes! It’s called the Corporate Annual Subscription License. For an annual fee of $15,400 up to 10 users at an organization may all use the following Sawtooth Software tools:
Purchased individually for 10 users, the regular price (even after the volume discount) would be more than $200,000. Even for a single user, the standard licenses for all these components would cost around $36,000. Annual subscription license users receive current updates and upgrades as soon as they become available. We're offering the subscription license option because many of you want greater access to our tools, without having to justify and manage the purchase of each new component or upgrade. It's much easier to set a budget based on an annual license, and with that annual fee you know you have access to the latest versions of nearly every tool in Sawtooth Software's product line. We will continue to sell our standard one-time purchase licenses as before, as some customers find this a more affordable way to purchase just the tools they need, for particular limited projects. Comments on “Bottom-Up” and Best-Worst CBCThe following article is adapted from “Comment on Wirth and Marshall et al.” by Sawtooth Software’s president, Bryan Orme, to be published in the forthcoming Sawtooth Software Conference 2010 Proceedings.Intro At the 2010 Sawtooth Software Conference, two speakers (Ralph Wirth, and Don Marshall) tested the bold assertions that Jordan Louviere made at the 2009 Sawtooth Software Conference. Louviere argued that traditional CBC models (where respondents pick the best alternative from sets) modeled with HB estimation were inferior and biased. He cited evidence from split-sample studies he had conducted. He proposed a new approach (Bottom Up) that collected more than just first choices for each CBC tasks and used purely individual-level estimation instead of HB. Jordan put us on notice in 2009, announcing that our common Top Down methods (i.e. HB) were “soooo WRONG,” and that Bottom Up methods were like an asteroid strike that would lead to species extinction. Rather than ask for just first choice in each CBC set, Jordan’s Bottom Up approach asks the respondent to indicate the best concept in the set and the worst concept in the set. Then, respondents are asked if all of the concepts are acceptable, none are acceptable, or if some are acceptable. Credit Where Credit Is Due Jordan should be given credit for the many contributions to the field, especially his influential paper in 1983 that demonstrated to the marketing community the benefits and mechanics of discrete choice experiments. Jordan’s MaxDiff scaling was also a very useful invention. For these contributions and others, Louviere was awarded the 2010 Parlin Award. Jordan has correctly argued that individual respondents shouldn’t be directly compared (on the utilities) without somehow accounting for scale differences. Sawtooth Software’s founder, Rich Johnson, recognized this issue as early as the 1970s. Since the 1980s, Sawtooth Software’s market simulators have summarized respondent utilities for reporting purposes after applying a normalization procedure. For each respondent, a normalizing constant is selected such that the sums of utility ranges across attributes are equal for each respondent. In our most recent simulators, this normalization procedure is called zero-centered diffs. Sawtooth Software advocates using zero-centered diffs in tabulations when comparing groups and also in subsequent cluster analyses to find groups of similar respondents. But, raw utilities are used in the market simulator to project respondent choices. Was Jordan Right in His 2009 Presentation? Why was an entire session of the 2010 Sawtooth Software Conference dedicated to the subject of Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down methods? In Jordan’s 2009 presentation, he said the following:
Jordan described his Bottom-Up approach as a game-changing asteroid event, akin to the massive global strike 60 million years ago that is argued to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. These were indeed bold assertions, that if correct, would have meant that those using traditional CBC and HB estimation were harming their clients and risked extinction. Thanks to the Herculean efforts of Ralph Wirth, Joe Curry, Don Marshall, Siu-Shing Chan, Rich Johnson, Jordan Louviere, Bart Frischknecht, and John Rose, we now have substantial evidence that Jordan was not right. Ralph Wirth conducted an extensive study using synthetic CBC data. His findings suggest that if you want to use Jordan’s questionnaire approach for CBC, there is no advantage to using the purely individual-level estimation over HB. Even when Wirth varied the error variance across respondents, he found no troubles for HB. The claim that HB estimation is biased and misleading seems unfounded. The recovery of known utility parameters was solid and unbiased for HB. Marshall et al.’s two studies (the pizza and camera studies) suggest that for real respondents, Bottom-Up doesn’t do any better than traditional Top-Down CBC (for the camera data set, it was generally worse). But, Bottom-Up…
Jordan’s Bottom-Up approach has two major differences from Sawtooth Software’s standard CBC + CBC/HB approach. First, he collects more information from each choice task (best and worst concepts, plus a more complex None choice). Second, he analyzes the data using purely individual-level estimation rather than HB. Jordan’s main assertion from 2009 was that HB estimation is biased and misleading. To test this claim, I used CBC/HB software to re-analyze the Bottom-Up respondent data for the camera questionnaire. To do so, I coded each choice task as a series of paired comparisons between concepts (“exploded rankings”). The HB run took just 50 minutes for all 600 respondents, even though the rank-order explosion resulted in over 100 choice tasks per respondent. The HB utilities outperformed the purely individual-level estimation. This clearly demonstrates that (holding the data constant) HB provides better results than the purely individual-level estimation that Louviere implemented in this round of research. Is There Value in Best-Worst CBC? For a few years now, some researchers have advocated asking respondents to identify both the Best and Worst concepts within each choice task (B-W CBC). Three papers at this conference (Chrzan et al., Wirth, and Marshall et al.) have presented evidence that asking respondents to identify the worst concept in addition to the best concept can actually improve predictions of best-only holdout choices. Up until this conference, I had been skeptical of the value of asking for worst choices within CBC tasks. Given the evidence presented at this conference, we plan to provide an option for asking B-W choices in the next version of our CBC software, so researchers can experiment with this option. Perhaps we’ll see more research on this subject in a future Sawtooth Software conference. At first glance, it doesn’t seem logical that adding information regarding worst concepts should help predict what respondents prefer best in holdout sets. But, producing a winning concept involves maximizing good aspects and minimizing bad aspects. Thus, considering both kinds of information may be useful in maximizing the likelihood of consumer choice. As long as worst information comes at little cost and is proven to have little or no bias, then it would appear to be a good idea…which gives us another reason to thank Jordan for his contributions. Jordan may not always be right, but he does make you think. And, that process can lead to important discovery. Price Reduced for Survey Hosting ServiceLast year, we updated our survey hosting business. We created a web-based portal in which you can upload new surveys in moments to our servers, without any human intervention on our side (once we have approved your account). This makes it faster than before for you to manage studies.When we changed our hosting procedures and model, we also changed the way that hosting services were billed. Our new billing model involves a fixed cost per month for the server and a variable cost per completed record. We initially chose rates that we calculated would on average reduce the hosting costs for customers, assuming they chose server configurations that minimized their overall hosting fees. After a few months of observing the actual outcome, we saw that we could reduce fees even further to achieve our original aims. So, at the end of last year, we lowered the pricing for the Light and Basic servers. The new costs per complete for the different server sizes were decreased as follows:
The fixed monthly costs per server are as follows: $100 for Light Server; $300 for Basic Server; $750 for Premium Server. |
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