In this example, a computer manufacturer is interested in manufacturing a new laptop and wants information about customer preferences before beginning an expensive development process. The manufacturer decides to construct a design consisting of two sets of profiles that will be administered to ten respondents. The goal of the choice design is to understand how potential laptop purchasers view the advantages of a collection of four attributes:
• size of hard drive disk (40 GB or 80 GB)
• speed of processor (1.5 GHz or 2.0 GHz)
• battery life (4 Hrs or 6 Hrs)
• cost of computer ($1000, $1200 or $1500)
To construct the design for the ten respondents, you first conduct a small pilot study using only one respondent. Then you analyze the results and use the parameter estimates as prior information in designing the final study for the ten respondents.