Widespread car usage of around 800 million of cars travelling 30 billion of kilometres on a daily basis has led to many benefits but also to significant environmental and societal impacts such as congestion, air and noise pollution and urban sprawl. This thesis aims to investigate the stakeholder values of car parking in order to support and inform the decision makers who are tasked with how best to resolve challenging car parking dilemmas. A two phase progressive methodology is involved. Phase one begins with conducting a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with eight academics to identify whom the stakeholders are that are affected by car parking. Then a second series of 20 interviews are conducted with sector leaders of stakeholder groups to establish how the stakeholders are affected by car parking and importantly, how they value car parking. Finally a third series of nine interviews are conducted with nine different experts to help to bridge the gap between phase one and phase two. Phase one found that a broader reach of stakeholders (classified into four different groups) are affected by car parking than the literature might imply, and that they value car parking in eight different key ways. It also found that the values emerged from a context of governmental, social and consumer concerns. Phase two of the methodology was quantitative and used the findings from phase one to develop four additional attributes considered meaningful across all four stakeholder groups, namely: safety, politics, public spaces and weekly household council tax. Choice based conjoint analysis was used to incorporate the attributes into three hypothetical scenarios namely; driver, strategy and social, as these were considered to be reflective of the value context unearthed previously in phase one. The scenarios were disseminated across England as part of a wider survey and achieved a sample size of 1107 responses. The results of which were then interpreted through willingness to pay (WTP) values. Key findings included: how a persistent political undertone can impact on car parking policy setting; that the car parking industry is under pressure to provide a service chiefly motivated by a perceived consumer intolerance of market prices; and that stakeholders can not only appreciate but also experience the impact of car parking choices on other stakeholder groups. Conclusions drawn included that the different stakeholder groups took issue with national government leadership believing it to currently be deficient in setting the standards for British car parking. Moreover, decision makers wrongly perceive that consumers of car parking do not pass between the groups and are therefore hostile to policies which do not directly benefit them. The key implication being that decision makers are cautious to implement policies which are not necessarily advantageous to consumers but which may lead to gains for the remaining stakeholder groups. In short, this thesis recommends amongst others that the governmental stakeholder group should seek to provide direction and guidelines for tariff setting which is reflective of the provision of a service that is conscious of the range of parking industry stakeholder values. Furthermore, as safety is an industry held value, practitioners should seek to better understand how it impacts their market. They should explore the relevance of schemes such as Park Mark to operators and their customers, by fundamentally investigating to what extent safety exists as a valid concern inside car parks and how it applies to personal safety, vehicle safety or general perceptions of safety. In addition, where the governmental stakeholder group remain mindful of the significance of securing political backing, the car parking industry would benefit from appreciating the sensitivities of political challenges faced by the governmental group when lobbying for any changes in parking policy programmes. Indeed, the parking industry should collaborate between the two parties and seek to unite in finding agreeable solutions which benefit constituents either directly or indirectly. As car parking values might differ according to their geopolitical context and lead to the extraction of a different set of attributes, further work would include looking beyond England to first the UK and then to abroad to explore the effects of potential cultural differences and learn the relevant lessons.

No description available.

A cultural tour package is essentially a travel package that bundles tourism products and services together with themes based on the destination's culture. Winnipeg's Cultural Tour Package Research project, proposed by Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra (WSO), is a project aiming to structure a tourism package centered at Winnipeg's performing arts and cultural attractions. Through the program, we identify customers' preference for the cultural items as well as the factors related to the preference. We also provide a marketing plan suggesting the direction of starting the program based on SWOT and marketing mix analyses. The research is contributable to both the marketing and the cultural tourism literatures. Also, in practical, the research stands at a macro level to demonstrate the benefits of integrating cultural items in Winnipeg and to suggest ways for WSO to cooperate with other cultural or supporting institutions to offer the program. / October 2015

[pt] Entender o comportamento do consumidor é essencial para qualquer empresa que queira ter sucesso, já que, segundo Kotler (1994), existe uma relação direta entre satisfação do consumidor, qualidade do produto e serviço e rentabilidade da empresa. No mercado odontológico não é diferente. Entender como se processa o comportamento de compra dos dentistas e quais os fatores por eles considerados prioritários são pontos importantes para as empresas oferecerem produtos e serviços adequados às suas necessidades. Entretanto, as fontes secundárias de pesquisa na indústria são escassas. Os dados são muito superficiais e estão pulverizados por sites do governo e de órgãos reguladores, e nem todas as informações estão atualizadas. O objetivo deste trabalho é identificar quais caracterí­sticas de uma resina são relevantes para a decisão de compra de um dentista. As informações geradas por esta pesquisa são de grande importância para a tomada de decisão das empresas deste segmento. Para entender como os dentistas desenvolvem suas preferências e apontar quais os atributos mais importantes de uma resina, foi aplicada a teoria da análise conjunta. Os atributos e ní­veis a serem avaliados foram levantados por meio de grupos de foco. E com a ajuda de um software estatí­stico, foi escolhido o conjunto de estí­mulos que seriam julgados pelos dentistas na pesquisa de campo. Esta etapa da pesquisa foi realizada com base em questionários entregues aos dentistas pessoalmente ou via correio eletrônico. Como existia a suspeita de que as necessidades dos profissionais que atendem a convênios ou clí­nicas populares seria diferente das necessidades dos dentistas que atendem pacientes particulares, os formulários foram identificados. Com base nas respostas, foram analisadas de forma separadas as importâncias relativas dos atributos e utilidades dos ní­veis propostos. Os resultados da pesquisa mostraram que dentistas que atendem a convênios e clí­nicas particulares são mais sensí­veis a preço e que dentistas que atendem pacientes particulares buscam produtos com maiores recursos estísticos. / [en] According to Kotler (1994), there is a direct relationship among consumer's satisfaction, services and product quality and a company's profitability. In this sense, understanding consumer's behavior is essential for any enterprise that wants to be successful. It is not different in the odontological sector. Understanding how is processed the buying behavior of dentists and which factors they consider as the most relevant is important for companies to offer products and services adequate to their needs. However, the secondary sources of research in this industry are scarce. The data available is superficial and it is spread out on government and regulatory agencies websites, which not always present updated information. The objective of this paper is to identify which characteristics of a resin are relevant for the buying decision of a dentist. The output of this research is crucial for the decision making process of companies from this segment. Aiming to understand how dentists develop their preferences and to show the most important attributes of a resin, the conjoint analysis theory has been applied. The attributes and levels to be evaluated have been chosen through focus group. Based on statistical software, the set of stimuli that would be judged by the dentists during the field research has been defined. This phase of the research has been completed based on questionnaires submitted to the dentists personally or via electronic mail. The forms have been previously identified due to the fact that professionals who attend to health plans or popular clinics may have different needs from those who attend to private patients. Based on the responses, the relative importance of the proposed attributes and utilities have been analyzed separately. The outputs of the research have shown that dentists who attend to health plans and/or popular clinics are more price seeking while dentists who attend to private patients look for products that have more esthetic appeal.

A Análise de Preferência Conjunta (APC) é uma metodologia estatística bastante utilizada em estudos de comportamento do consumidor e do mercado em geral. Ela possibilita a realização de estudos sobre julgamentos individuais, tais como a aceita-bilidade e preferência por um determinado produto no momento da sua aquisição (ver Artes, 1991 e Friedmann, 1998). Em um estudo de preferência conjunta, são apresentadas configurações hipotéticas de um mesmo produto, que devem ser avaliadas segundo a preferência do respondente. O julgamento de um estímulo é denominado de valor de preferência que nada mais é do que a quantificação da preferência do indivíduo por um estímulo. Quanto maior o número de atributos e níveis utilizados na caracterização de um produto, mais real será sua descrição. No entanto, a complexidade dos estímulos e o número de configurações possíveis aumenta exponencialmente a cada novo atributo ou nível acrescentado, podendo comprometer a qualidade dos resultados de uma pesquisa. Este problema é contornado através da utilização de estímulos gerados através de planejamentos fracionários combinado na omissão de um ou mais atributos nos diferentes estímulos, conhecidos como perfis incompletos. Neste trabalho, pretende-se testar o efeito da ausência de atributos na classificação de estímulos e diferentes formas de imputação da informação faltante em uma aplicação sobre o efeito de características do emprego na satisfação do funcionário. / Conjoint Analysis is a statistic technique used in many behavior studies, product management and marketing researches. The conjoint method involves presenting customers with a test set of hypothetical products profiles and collecting their preferences. It\'s task is to identify some within a set of attributes those ones that are the most important for the research participants. Conjoint Analysis works better when the test set of profiles is small and the number of attributes is not so large. When a large number of attributes are considered in a conjoint study, the final number of possible profiles increase a lot. In this cases, fractional designs and incomplete profiles can be used to solve this problem. In this study will be tested the missing information efect in a conjoint study and will be compared some diferent imputations methods.

O presente trabalho tem o objetivo de identificar fatores intervenientes na adoção de energias limpas nos principais setores industriais do Estado de São Paulo. Para tanto, apresenta a fundamentação teórica sobre os diversos temas pertinentes a pesquisa, tais como: o atual cenário energético brasileiro e o desenvolvimento sustentável, bem como o estudo dos métodos aplicados. A análise dos dados realizada teve caráter qualitativo e quantitativo, por meio, respectivamente, da Técnica do Incidente Crítico e da Análise Conjunta. A aplicação da Técnica do Incidente Crítico forneceu os atributos que as empresas consideram importantes no processo de escolha. Já a Análise Conjunta, técnica estatística multivariada de análise de dados, foi utilizada para determinar a utilidade e importância relativa dos atributos relevantes na escolha das empresas. Com os resultados da pesquisa acredita-se que as empresas usuárias e não usuárias de energias limpas poderão ter conhecimentos sobre a opinião de seus pares com relação às vantagens e desvantagens do uso destes energéticos nos processos produtivos, assim como ao governo estabelecer estratégias adequadas para orientar e estimular a adoção de energias que promovem baixo impacto ao meio ambiente. / The scope of the present work is to identify intervening factors in the adoption of clean energy resources in the main industrial sectors of the São Paulo state. In order to perform such evaluation, a theoretical reasoning on the various relevant issues related to the research shall be displayed, such as: the current brazilian energy context and sustainable development, as well as the study of applied methods. The data analysis was realized guided on a qualitative and quantitative basis, by means, respectively, of the Critical Incident Technique and the Conjoint Analysis. The application of the Critical Incident Technique has imputed capabilities that companies regard as pivotal in the selection process. The Conjoint Analysis, on its hand, multivariate statistics technique on data analysis, was used in order to determine the utility and relative importance of the capabilities relevant to the companies\' selection. Based on the results inferred from the research it may be conjectured that companies that adopt and do not adopt clean energy resources may acquire acknowledge about the opinion of its couples in what it concerns the advantages and disadvantages of the use of these energetic in these productive processes, as well the government may set to establish adequate strategies in order to instruct and encourage the adoption of energy resources that promote a lesser impact to the environment.

One of the major demand related risks for companies that produce consumer electronics goods is change in consumer preferences over time as reflected in the weights they attach to the attributes of products. This contributes to the difficulty of predicting whether consumers will purchase a new product or not and the accuracy of such forecasts can have significant ramifications for companies’ strategies, profitability and even their chances of survival. Knowledge of attribute-weights and accurate forecasts of new products can give companies better insights during the product development stages, inform go-no-go decisions on whether to launch a developed product and also support decisions on whether a recently launched product should be withdrawn or not due to poor early stage sales. Despite the important implications of change in attribute-weights, no research has investigated the extent to which such changes occur and impact on the accuracy of forecasts of the future market share of these products. Prior to the current research, it was assumed that the weights are constant over time – even when the nature of the attributes was assumed to change. To investigate these concerns choice based conjoint (CBC) was applied to data gathered in a longitudinal survey of consumer choices relating a range of consumer electronic products, where innovation has different rates and the product life cycles are various. This allowed an assessment of the extent to which the weights of attributes of choice-based conjoint models change over a six months period for consumer durable products and the degree to which this variability is dependent on the nature of the product. It demonstrates that the change in weights is greater for products that have high technological complexity and shorter lifecycles and also links the changeability of weights to the characteristics of potential consumers. The results of thesis demonstrate that the assumption of constant weights can potentially lead to inaccurate market share forecast for high-tech, short life-cycle products that are launched several months after the choice-based modelling has been conducted.

Este estudo tem por objetivo identificar quais são os atributos de produto mais importantes – e seu grau de importância relativa – na compra ou recomendação de interruptores a consumidores finais, eletricistas e arquitetos. O método foi dividido em fases, com abordagem qualitativa e quantitativa. Inicialmente, foram conduzidas entrevistas em profundidade com consumidores e especialistas, com o objetivo de levantar o máximo de atributos salientes, bem como seus níveis. Em seguida, uma survey online, com 558 consumidores, identificou quais desses atributos são mais importantes no processo decisório de compra e uma validação com executivos da área foi conduzida. Os cinco atributos definidos como mais importantes foram: Marca, Acabamento, Garantia, Material Amarelar e Preço. Para identificar o grau de importância relativa de cada atributo, foi utilizado o método conjoint analysis. A pesquisa foi desenvolvida com 116 pessoas, sendo 60 consumidores finais, 28 arquitetos e 28 eletricistas, de cinco regiões do Brasil. Os resultados foram segmentados e analisados de forma agregada, por região, por atuação profissional e por clusters, grupos com preferências de atributo em comum. A análise conjunta revelou que Marca e Material Amarelar obtiveram a maior importância relativa para a amostra total. Pretende-se que este estudo contribua para que executivos da área possam aplicar estratégias de marketing em seus negócios, a fim de obter melhores resultados. / This study aims to identify what are the most important product attributes - and its degree of relative importance – in the purchase or recommendation of interrupters by end users, electricians and architects. The method was divided into phases of qualitative and quantitative approach. Initially, interviews in depth were conducted with consumers and experts in order to enumerate the maximum salient attributes and their levels. Then an online survey with 558 consumers identified which of those attributes are most important in the decision buying process and a validation with area executives was conducted. The five attributes defined as most important were: Brand, Finishing, Warranty, Material Yellowing and Price. To identify the degree of relative importance of each attribute, conjoint analysis method was used. The survey was conducted with 116 people, 60 end users, 28 architects and 28 electricians on five different regions of Brazil. The results were segmented and analyzed in aggregate way, by region, by professional role and by clusters, group with attribute preferences in common. The analysis revealed that the Brand and the Material Yellowing obtained the greater relative importance for the total sample. It is intended that this study will contribute to that area executives can apply marketing strategies in their business in order to get better results.

A Análise de Preferência Conjunta (APC) é uma metodologia estatística bastante utilizada em estudos de comportamento do consumidor e do mercado em geral. Ela possibilita a realização de estudos sobre julgamentos individuais, tais como a aceita-bilidade e preferência por um determinado produto no momento da sua aquisição (ver Artes, 1991 e Friedmann, 1998). Em um estudo de preferência conjunta, são apresentadas configurações hipotéticas de um mesmo produto, que devem ser avaliadas segundo a preferência do respondente. O julgamento de um estímulo é denominado de valor de preferência que nada mais é do que a quantificação da preferência do indivíduo por um estímulo. Quanto maior o número de atributos e níveis utilizados na caracterização de um produto, mais real será sua descrição. No entanto, a complexidade dos estímulos e o número de configurações possíveis aumenta exponencialmente a cada novo atributo ou nível acrescentado, podendo comprometer a qualidade dos resultados de uma pesquisa. Este problema é contornado através da utilização de estímulos gerados através de planejamentos fracionários combinado na omissão de um ou mais atributos nos diferentes estímulos, conhecidos como perfis incompletos. Neste trabalho, pretende-se testar o efeito da ausência de atributos na classificação de estímulos e diferentes formas de imputação da informação faltante em uma aplicação sobre o efeito de características do emprego na satisfação do funcionário. / Conjoint Analysis is a statistic technique used in many behavior studies, product management and marketing researches. The conjoint method involves presenting customers with a test set of hypothetical products profiles and collecting their preferences. It\'s task is to identify some within a set of attributes those ones that are the most important for the research participants. Conjoint Analysis works better when the test set of profiles is small and the number of attributes is not so large. When a large number of attributes are considered in a conjoint study, the final number of possible profiles increase a lot. In this cases, fractional designs and incomplete profiles can be used to solve this problem. In this study will be tested the missing information efect in a conjoint study and will be compared some diferent imputations methods.

We propose and test a new adaptive conjoint analysis method that draws on recent polyhedral “interior-point” developments in mathematical programming. The method is designed to offer accurate estimates after relatively few questions in problems involving many parameters. Each respondent’s ques-tions are adapted based upon prior answers by that respondent. The method requires computer support but can operate in both Internet and off-line environments with no noticeable delay between questions. We use Monte Carlo simulations to compare the performance of the method against a broad array of relevant benchmarks. While no method dominates in all situations, polyhedral algorithms appear to hold significant potential when (a) metric profile comparisons are more accurate than the self-explicated importance measures used in benchmark methods, (b) when respondent wear out is a concern, and (c) when product development and/or marketing teams wish to screen many features quickly. We also test hybrid methods that combine polyhedral algorithms with existing conjoint analysis methods. We close with suggestions on how polyhedral methods can be used to address other marketing problems. / Sloan School of Management and the Center for Innovation in Product Development at MIT