A New Constrained Parameter Estimation Approach in Preference Decomposition

In this paper, we propose a constrained optimization model for conjoint analysis (a preference decomposition technique) to improve parameter estimation by restricting the relative importance of the attributes to an extent as decided by the respondents. Quite simply, respondents are asked to provide some pairwise attribute comparisons that are then incorporated as additional constraints in a linear programming model that estimates the partial preference values. This data collection method is typical in the analytic hierarchy process. Results of a simulation study show the new model can improve the predictive accuracy in partial value estimation by ordinal east squares (OLS) regression.