Publications by Joel Cadwell
Respecting Real-World Decision Making and Rejecting Models That Do Not: No MaxDiff or Best-Worst Scaling
Utility has been reified, and we have committed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.As this link illustrates, Sawtooth’s MaxDiff provides an instructive example of reification in marketing research. What is the contribution of “clean bathrooms” when selecting a fast food restaurant? When using the drive-thru window, the cleanliness of th...
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Top of the Heap: How Much Can We Learn from Partial Rankings?
The recommendation system gives you a long list of alternatives, but the consumer clicks on only a handful: most appealing first, then the second best, and so on until they stop with all the remaining receiving the same rating as not interesting enough to learn more. As a result, we know the preference order for only the most preferred. Survey re...
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Statistical Models with a Point of View: First vs. Third Person
Marketing data can be collected in the first or third person, and we require different statistical models for each point of view.Netflix encourages you to adopt a third-person perspective when it surveys your taste preferences by asking how often you watch different genres (e.g., action and adventures, comedies, dramas, horror, thrillers and more...
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Looking for Preference in All the Wrong Places: Neuroscience Suggests Choice Model Misspecification
At its core, choice modeling is a utility estimating machine. Everything has a value reflected in the price that we are willing to pay in order to obtain it. Here are a collection of Smart Watches from a search of Google Shopping. You are free to click on any one, look for more, or opt out altogether and buy nothing.Where is the utili...
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Generalizing from Marketing Research: The Right Question and the Correct Analysis
The marketing researcher asks some version of the following question in every study, “Tell me what you want?” The rest is a summary of the notes taken during the ensuing conversation.Steve Jobs’ quote suggests that we might do better getting a reaction to an actual product. You tell me that price is not particularly important to you, yet th...
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The Nature of Heterogeneity in Coevolving Networks of Customers and Products
The genre shirt asks, “What kind of music do u listen 2?”Microgenres exist because markets are fragmenting and marketers need names to attract emerging customer segments with increasingly specific preferences. The cost of producing and delivery music now supports a plenitude of joint pairings of recordings and customers. The coevolution of mu...
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Regression with Multicollinearity Yields Multiple Sets of Equally Good Coefficients
The multiple regression equation represents the linear combination of the predictors with the smallest mean-squared error. That linear combination is a factorization of the predictors with the factors equal to the regression weights. You may see the words “factorization” and “decomposition” interchanged, but do not be fooled. ...
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The Ecology of Local Subspaces: Mixtures of Parochial Views
No matter where you live, your view of the world is biased and limited, which is the beauty of this magazine cover.As a marketer, of course, all my maps depict, not place, but consumption. For example, in an earlier post I asked, “What apps are on your Smartphone?” It seemed like a reasonable question for a marketing researcher interested in ...
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Seeing Data as the Product of Underlying Structural Forms
Matrix factorization follows from the realization that nothing forces us to accept the data as given. We start with objects placed in rows and record observations on those objects arrayed along the top in columns. Neither the objects nor the measurements need to be preserved in their original form.It is helpful to remember that the en...
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"Models, Models Everywhere!" Brought to You by R
Statistical software packages sell solutions. If you go to the home page for SAS, they will tell you upfront that they sell products and solutions. They link both together under the first tab just below “The Power to Know” mantra. SPSS separates product and solution into separate tabs, but places both next to each other on its ho...
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