Hello,
I am running a CBC with conditional pricing (price depends on 2 attributes). I extracted the zero-centered diffs from CBC HB and imported them to SMRT. I tried to run a "First Choice" share of preference simulation, and am obtaining results different from what I had computed myself manually.
To investigate the issue, I added some custom Customer Segments to allow me to filter by specific respondent, and am noticing some strange results for certain respondents. I created two offers, and am including "None" in the share of choice results.
When I add up the total utilities for each offer (using the individual-level utilities found from CBC HB), I get the following utilities:
Offer 2 = -32.5
None = +33
However, the share of choice results indicates that the respondent chose Offer 2, and not the None option (I entered a None weight of 1, and other respondents do choose the None option). I am therefore wondering if maybe I am computing the total utility wrong ?
I am using conditional price, with -30%, 0% and +30%, and selected a Linear price from CBC HB, which gives me only one utility for the price. For these tests, I entered exactly the prices exactly at the medium level (+0%) from the conditional pricing table. Therefore, when adding up the total utilities for each offer, I simply add the value of the price utility as is to the existing offers (except None).
e.g. If the utilities for the respondent are as following, and the offer I select has att1_level1 and att2_level1:
att1_level1 -10
att1_level2 +5
att2_level1 +30
att2_level2 -46
price -45
none 8
Then, utility for Offer2 is: -10 + 30 -45 = -25.
Since -25 is smaller than 8, the respondent should choose None.
Am I doing anything wrong ?
EDIT: I've noticed that, in the example above, if I compare -25 to 8-45 = -37 (none utility - price utility), then I obtain exactly the same results as those from SMRT. This seems strange to me since the None option should not have a price. What would be the reason behind that ?