REPLY TO: “ON THE SENSITIVITY OF BRAND‐CHOICE SIMULATIONS TO ATTRIBUTE IMPORTANCE WEIGHTS”

Our reply to Curry, Louviere, and Augustine's critique of our earlier paper focuses on differences in motivation between our research and theirs. Our interest in the problem relates to the possible incorporation of self‐explicated evaluations in conjoint data collection methods; subsequent to the appearance of our original paper, we have developed hybrid models that combine elements of self‐explicated (compositional) and conjoint (decompositional) data collection procedures. As far as we can surmise from their critique, Curry, Louviere, and Augustine are concerned with much broader strategic issues relating share of choices in the consumer population to changes in the shape of attribute weight distributions, shape of the Pareto tradeoff boundary, and so on.