Assessing the Bias of Preference, Detection, and Identification Measures of Discrimination Ability in Product Design

Bruce Buchanan and Pamela W. Henderson
Additional contact information
Bruce Buchanan: New York University
Pamela W. Henderson: Carnegie Mellon University

Marketing Science, 1992, vol. 11, issue 1, 64-75

Abstract: Researchers often test consumers' abilities to discriminate between two product formulations. Such tests are used in new product development, quality control, and competitive assessment. This paper investigates three paired comparison taste tests, each requiring a different judgment. These are: preference (“Which of these two do you prefer?”), identification (“Which one of these two is Brand ?”) and detection (“Are these two products the same or different?”). Each task has biases that may influence the level of measured discrimination ability. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to compare subject discrimination ability as measured by all three tasks. Additionally, we test two scales of subject confidence ratings and discuss implications for product testing.

Keywords: discrimination; taste tests; empirical Bayes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1992
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mksc.11.1.64 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormksc:v:11:y:1992:i:1:p:64-75

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Marketing Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().