We're excited about Adaptive CBC (ACBC). It can offer unique advantages for stated choice research for complex problems involving typically about five or more attributes.
Sawtooth Software's products have benefited immensely from the interaction between practitioners and the academic community. We are not secretive about the algorithms and methodologies so that others may scrutinize and test our work. At our conferences and in the academic literature, the methods have been examined and tested. Some investigations have been favorable toward our work, while others have been critical. When the criticism has merit, we strive to improve the techniques.
ACBC has continued this tradition. Over the last nine years, we have presented the methodology and results at both academic and practitioner research conferences. We have submitted it for review among leading academics in discrete choice modeling. Since the release of ACBC in March 2009, we estimate that more than five-thousand ACBC projects have been completed. Two papers were delivered at the Sawtooth Software conference in March of 2009 that highlighted successful applications. Two additional case studies were delivered at the May 2009 joint SKIM/Sawtooth Software event in Prague, Czech Republic on ACBC. Then, four additional papers involving ACBC were delivered at the Sawtooth Software 2010, 2012, and 2013 conferences.
According to our customer tracking survey conducted in 2011-2018, ACBC projects represented as low as 11% (in 2011) to as high as 15% (in 2018) of conjoint analysis studies conducted over the previous 12 months (by Sawtooth Software customers if using CBC, ACBC, ACA, or CVA). Lately, ACBC's usage is more than triple that of ACA and CVA's use combined. This shows that in the nine years that ACBC has been available, it has established itself as an important new tool in our users' conjoint repertoire. The recent extension of ACBC into alternative-specific designs will likely fuel the popularity of ACBC software for choice studies.