(individual-specific) Status Quo Option? - Discrete Choice experiment

[#1]

Hi,

I am a fresh community member. I can't find a fundamental information for my design in the documentation (unless I use wrong wording). My discrete choice experiment (DCE) is about analyzing preferences of car-sharing users and non-users. The important point is the status quo option (important in DCE) which depends on your initial transport mode (e.g. bike, public transport, private car, etc). So below is a list of my interrogations in order.

1- I would like to have a status quo option (not an opt-out or "none of these" option) in the experiment. Is that possible to implement it in JMP? How? I can't find a tutorial on that. Maybe I am not using the correct vocabulary, then what is the wording in JMP to talk about "status quo" option? Does it have to do with "disallowed combinations"? Then how can I specify my status quo with this type of command?

2- Assuming, it is possible to implement a status quo option in JMP, is it possible to make it vary according to a preliminary answer that respondents give? E.g. in a preliminary question "what is your current transport mode", if the respondent answers "private/own car" then How do I make the choice set conditional to this answer (i.e. the respondent would then be presented different options from the private car status quo option)? If I don't make it conditional, then I may end up with a choice set like the following:  1) private car, 2) car-sharing and 3) status quo = private car (again...). The respondent would choose between two private car options in that case...

3- Assuming, it is possible to implement a status quo option in JMP and make it individual-specific, is it possible to go further and specify the levels of each attribute in the status quo option ? E.g. if the individual answered that her current transport mode is "private car" and that it costs her ""XXX $"" much per month (attribute COST) and has ""electric"" engine (attribute ENGINE), is it possible to implement these individual-specific attribute levels (""XXX $"" and ""electric"") in the status quo option? (or only possible to label the status quo "private car" with no choice/display of the levels). This question is pretty much linked to question 2. I really think that providing a status quo option with the real data of each respondent is the best I could implement.

4- Assuming it is too complicated to do this (questions 2 and/or 3), what would be an alternative for my experiment using JMP? Any suggestion or indication in the documentation? (opt out option? forcing choice between two alternatives whatever the status quo? I think these two suggestions make me lose some info unfortunately).

Many thanks for your help!

[#2]

Please see in JMP Help > Books > Design of Experiments for the design answers and Help > Books > Consumer Research for the analysis answers. Each book devotes an entire chapter to choice experiments.

[#3]

Thank you for your answer. I am exclusively interested in the design for now. I checked these two documents before posting my message. "Status quo" is a word that is never used in any of these documents. What would be the alternative wording then please? I think this may only be a question of wording here.

- I saw "None of these" option (meaning there is no preference across the presented alternatives), which is different from status quo, so this is not what I am looking for.

- I saw the "prior specification" section, which I still have a hard time linking properly to the status quo option. How do you ensure that the status quo is always one of the profiles in the choice set? If I understand well, it has to do with the "number of surveys" right? Does it mean that the number of surveys I enter is equal to the number of possible status quo (in my case the number of possible transport modes)? If yes, then how do I make the status quo option conditional to the preliminary answer to the "current transport mode" question?

Please, do you confirm that the document sections about "number of surveys" and "prior specification" I just mentioned are the ones that answer my question about individual-specific status quo? Or am I wrong?

Thank you again for your help.