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In the real world, buyer demand for a product can depend directly and indirectly on the marketing efforts of "other products" in different categories. The authors offer a behavioral rationale for the existence of the effects of "other products'" marketing efforts and propose a taxonomy of possible intercategory relationships. The discussion enables the authors to identify several promising new research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiattribute research in marketing seeks an understanding of the structure of customer decisions with respect to the market offerings of a firm and its competitors. Through such understanding the firm tries to evaluate and/or design its offerings for greater customer satisfaction and profitability. Recent applications of such research to new product evaluation and to concept generation are reviewed and critiqued, relevant methodologies are contrasted, and the import of this research trust for management is assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attraction effect refers to an inferior product's ability to increase the attractiveness of another alternative when the inferior product is added to a choice set. This article examines potential explanations for the attraction effect end its boundary conditions. The article reports several empirical investigations and suggests that the attraction effect may be moderated by such variables as stimulus meaningfulness and familiarity with the product category. The implications are relevant to research on context effects in consumer choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, product usage data, employing a substitution-in-use criterion, are analyzed and shown to yield managerially useful product-market structures for financial services. These structures are identified through a form of hierarchical clustering which is different from traditional clustering routines in that it focuses on the explained or accounted for variance in the categorization of objects, thereby reducing groupings due to chance covariation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to identify the boundaries of increasingly complex product-markets has spawned a number of analytical methods based on customer behavior or judgments. The various methods are compared and contrasted according to whether they are consistent with a conceptual definition of a product-market, and their ability to yield diagnostic insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider customer influences on market structure, arguing that market structure should explain the extent to which any given set of market offerings are substitutes or complements. We describe recent additions to the market structure analysis literature and identify promising directions for new research in market structure analysis. Impressive advances in data collection, statistical methodology and information technology provide unique opportunities for researchers to build market structure tools that can assist "real-time" marketing decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on measurement of utilities in conjoint analysis in marketing research citing its implications on the scaling of utilities by several computer programs as discussed in the article "Conjoint Utility Limits as Affected by Conjoint Design and Estimating Program," by Karson and Mullet. Specific errors on different algorithms and numbers made by Karson and Mullet were considered which may lead to misleading answers in market research programs. Evidently, if one needs to compare utilities, one should never compare single values from different attributes, simulations of product preference is recommended in using utilities and permissible rescalings may be necessary to apply conjoint utilities.

This paper suggests a procedure which analytically ties a model to predict users' predispositions to purchase different 'brands' in a product-market together with a search process to identify optimal new product ideas. Brands, conceptualized as attribute bundles, are located in a prespecified attribute space. The pairwise preference judgments of each individual in a representative sample drawn from the population of users are analyzed using the authors' LINMAP procedure (LINear programming techniques for Multidimensional Analysis of Preferences) to determine his ideal point and salience weights for the attributes of the space. A distance model of choice is postulated for each user and used to predict his probability of choosing nonexisting products. The models developed for each user are tied to methods for searching the product space to find "best" locations for new products. The proposed procedures are discussed and evaluated in the light of relevant conceptual and empirical research. The paper concludes with a discussion of additional applications of the behavioral framework of LINMAP to other marketing decision areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an abstract on the LINMAP, the Linear Programming Techniques for the Multidimensional Analysis Preferences, developed by Allan D. Shocker of the University of Pittsburgh and V. Srinivasan of Stanford University in the U.S. The basic inputs are stimuli coordinates in a prespecified attribute space and the ordinal preference judgments of one or more judges. Virtually all input data are also output wherein preference judgments are summarized for multiple judgments. The computer program uses the Fortran IV programming language.