SOME CAUTIONARY NOTES ON THE USE OF CONJOINT MEASUREMENT FOR HUMAN JUDGMENT MODELING

Conjoint measurement has been suggested as a methodology that might be useful in assisting research concerned with the identification of the structural form of a judge's model. This paper synthesizes the results of some recent research that examined the robustness of this methodology. This research suggests that conjoint measurement has three major weaknesses: (1) certain biases exist when diagnosing model structure, (2) model diagnosis is limited to a small set of potential models, and (3) error substantially compromises conjoint measurement's ability to diagnose model structure. An empirical example that demonstrates some of the difficulties of using this methodology with experimental data is also presented.