A heuristic method for estimating attribute importance by measuring choice time in a ranking task

The evaluation of a product or service in terms of its attributes has been broadly studied in marketing, management and decision sciences. However, methods for finding important attributes have theoretical and practical limitations. The former are related to the selection of the most appropriate model; the latter are due to large number of variables that affect the specific experimental context. This study aims to present a new methodology that captures attribute preferences from a respondent and in particular, by using the choice time in a ranking task, it allows to indirectly obtain the importance weights for several tested attributes through a simple, fast and inexpensive procedure. Moreover, the method makes it possible to overcome problems associated with context, survey and cognitive variables so allowing to achieve more reliable conclusions. An application of the method concerning a cellular phone validates the proposed method.

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