Is it useful to include pricing if there´s no database for an "average price"?

Question

Hello everyone,

for my Masters thesis im conducting a CBC on vinyl records. After a brainstorming session with 20 vinyl buyers these attributes will be part of my CBC:

Condition of the record
Condition of the cover
Limitation
Color
Additional Gimmicks (like Posters)
Edition (first press, repress)

Almost everyone in the brainstorming session mentioned price as an important attribute. But concerning different price levels in different genres there´s simply no way to find an average price suiting for every genre. Is there a way to solve this problem? Thanks in advance

Best Wishes

Daniel

Answer 1

It does seem very tricky for a niche market like this since the value is probably strongly tied to the actual record, and then all of your other attributes are more like modifiers.  Sometimes we do treat price as relative, like -10% below Average, Average, +10% above average, but I'm not sure if that is a great solution for you?  Or maybe you could pair that with having some type of reference, like if a person says they like Rock and Roll, you could show them that album and the current price, then the conjoint could show the relative prices but actually do the math for them?

Comments

Hey there,

thanks for the answer. Do you have any studies using relative prices like you mentioned above? That would be very useful to see how this approach has been used before. Thanks in advance.

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I can't think of a specific published example off the top of my head.  The approach in general is called conditional pricing as it discussed in a white paper on our website here: https://sawtoothsoftware.com/resources/technical-papers/three-ways-to-treat-overall-price-in-conjoint-analysis