Express analysis for prioritization: Best–Worst Scaling alteration to System 1

Abstract

The work considers modification of the Best–Worst Scaling (BWS) to the so-called System 1 (S1) approach. S1 was described by D. Kahneman as a spontaneous and automatic reaction by an unconscious way in which human decision-makers choose among multiple alternatives. Application of S1 can be seen as a simplified BWS for data eliciting and express analysis of prioritization between many compared items. In S1, a respondent picks the items with which she feels “happy”, and those can be one, several, all, or none items in a task. Estimation of utilities is performed by multinomial-logit modeling with different optimization criteria which produce parameters of the models and choice probabilities of the items. Numerical examples by marketing research data are encouraging and demonstrating that spontaneous choice decisions can make S1 approach very fast, efficient, and convenient for express analysis of items prioritization, especially for big data.

Keywords:

• System 1
• BWS
• max diff
• MNL utility
• choice probability
• prioritization

Acknowledgements

The author thanks two reviewers whose constructive comments helped to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.