Unstable interactions in customers’ decision making: an experimental proof

Understanding customers’ decision and behavior is the crux of marketing. Despite the broad applications of weighted sum approaches, like conjoint analysis, sophisticated methodological approaches are under-researched in this field. Conversely, multi-criteria decision making’s (MCDM) objective is to focus on and forecast these decisions. Based on the Choquet integral, this paper presents an effective and precise calculation method to understand real customers’ decision making and to overcome the weighted sum method’s limitations. We compare the weighted sum approach with stable and instable Choquet integral methods in three experimental studies. Our results indicate that the weighted sum approach is valuable in pure order-related applications. In quantitative comparisons, both the stable and instable Choquet integral approaches match the decision makers’ preferences more closely than the weighted sum approach. The paper demonstrates that well-developed traditional approaches have their merits and can still be applied in the right context.