AN ALTERNATING LEAST‐SQUARES PROCEDURE FOR ESTIMATING MISSING PREFERENCE DATA IN PRODUCT‐CONCEPT TESTING*
提出一种模型和迭代估计程序，利用响应矩阵内部结构和受访者背景数据，填补产品概念测试中受访者未评价概念的缺失数据，并考虑个体评分尺度差异，可用于市场细分和产品线决策。
ABSTRACT Product‐concept testing is a popular activity in marketing research. Often the number of new product/service concepts under study far exceeds the time available for any single respondent. Respondents therefore may receive only a subset of the concepts comprising the total design. Researchers are interested in making plausible imputations for the missing evaluations of any given respondent. This paper proposes a model and an iterative estimation procedure to impute missing entries for each evaluator. The model and the procedure incorporate (1) the internal structure of the response matrix and (2) an ancillary matrix of (nonmissing) respondent background data; they also (3) allow for individual differences in respondents' uses of the numerical rating scale. The model is applied to both real and synthetic data. Suggestions also are given on how the data imputations may be used in market segmentation and product‐line decisions.