Abstract
Analyzing the welfare effects of pricing practices is not simple in the postal sector, where the sender pays all and the preferences of the recipients are not incorporated directly in the price.
Any views or opinions presented in this chapter are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of Poste Italiane or CRA or any of the affiliated institutions. We would like to thank the discussant Frank Rodriguez, Associate, Oxera, and the Chairman of the session Michael Crew, CRRI Rutgers University for their constructive comments.
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Notes
- 1.
Intuitively, business senders take into account the value of their message to the recipient in deciding whether and when to send a message. For example, advertisers mail when a special campaign needs to reach the recipient on Friday or Saturday morning for the weekend shopping. However, this does not generally apply to all recipient of the campaign and the campaign turns out only for a minority of recipient. If the recipient does not cover the cost directly or pay the sender indirectly, then probably the recipient is neutral or negative to a campaign (environmental concerns).
- 2.
Choice-based conjoint analysis also has disadvantages “……due to the fact that having respondents make choices is an inefficient way to elicit preferences. Each concept is typically described on all the attributes being considered in the study, and each choice set contains several concepts. Therefore, the respondent has to process a lot of information before giving a single answer for each choice set. Although this does mimic what happens in the marketplace, the analyst ends up with far less information than would have been available had the task been to rate each alternative in the set.” (Sawtooth 2013, p. 3)
- 3.
The sample was created using a casual sample from the phone directory taking into account the gender, age, geographical distribution of the population and the type of city of residence (e.g., metropolitan, small city).
- 4.
Results are statistically significant, 95 % confidence interval.
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Gori, S., Martinelli, B.M., Scarfiglieri, G. (2016). Using Market Research to Analyze Consumer Preferences. In: Crew, M., Brennan, T. (eds) The Future of the Postal Sector in a Digital World. Topics in Regulatory Economics and Policy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24454-9_18
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