Modeling Consumer Preferences over the Smartphone Attributes: A Choice Experiment Analysis

Abstract

This paper measures the consumers’ willingness to pay for hypothetical graphene-based smartphones (GBSs). The hypothetical smartphones contain desirable graphene-based attributes (GBAs) such as a stronger touch screen, lighter device (140 gm and 80 gm), faster battery charging (45 minutes and 30 minutes), the availability of solar power charging, and foldable touch screen. To form the hypothetical smartphones, we applied an orthogonal design in the Choice Experiment technique to match various graphene-based attributes at different levels. The technique requires respondents to choose the most preferred smartphones from a series of smartphones presented to them. We interviewed 657 respondents in Peninsular Malaysia with a face-to-face data collection method. The respondents consist of users and non-users of smartphones and the method of analysis is conditional logit model. In the preliminary data analysis involving the full sample, the estimation results show that most of the selected GBAs are significant. These results imply that it pays for smartphone firms to invest in and commercialize those attributes. When the full sample was divided into users and non-users of smartphones, we found that the results of the user sample mimicked those of the full sample. We took the user sample as our baseline sample and tested whether the preferences over GBAs are different for different consumer segments. We obtained results that are broadly consistent with our hypotheses.