Market simulator - Willingness to forego financial benefit

Question

Hello,

I am conducting a study about job choice and I have one attribute – salary. It is opposite to price. Here higher salary is preferred. Basically, I would like calculate the willingness to forego a part of salary to work for a company with, e.g. better career opportunities. So, I used the quick button to calculate WTP from market simulator in lighthouse studio, but the result came out with warning "*100% of the sampling draws resulted in extrapolated values, and 99.7% did not converge"
My question is: What should I do in this case? Can I specify it somewhere to avoid software see salary as price and automatically assumes that the lower is better?
Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

WTP assumes that with your price attribute, lower prices are better.  It assumes that to equalize an enhanced share it should raise prices to accomplish it.  With Salary as the "Price" attribute, more is always better...so this poses a problem.  

One possible solution would be to reverse the scale of the Salary attribute to "trick" the software into estimating WTP using a Salary attribute.  In the market simulator, you would click the "Attribute Info" icon.  Then, for the Salary attribute, you'd mark it as the "price" attribute and that it is continuous.  Next, we'd modify the "Value" fields to flip the scale.

For example, let's say the salary levels in your study were:

40
50
70
100

Two ways to flip the scale:

1) Put negative symbols in front of the salary values, leading to values for Salary of:

-40
-50
-70
-100

or,

2.  You could flip the scale by maintaining the same increment spacing between each of the levels (e.g. a 10 unit difference between levels 1 and 2), but reversing the direction, such as:

100
90
70
40

When you specify your scenarios (the product "specifications") you'll of course want to specify the salary amounts on the flipped scale (according to either method above).

Now, the WTP algorithm will try to decrease the salary to drive the share of preference back down for an enhanced product (job offer) on other features.