Modeling preferences: beyond the average effects

Preference mapping are a collection of multivariate statistical techniques widely used by marketing and R&D divisions to understand which sensory characteristics drive consumer acceptance of goods. These techniques provide a perceptual map of the products based on the so-called sensory dimensions, on which the liking values for each consumer are regressed. This study proposes an innovative preference mapping based on the quantile regression. Using the quantile regression instead of the classical least squares regression allows to explore the whole distribution of the consumer preference. This permits to obtain additional information both at the individual consumer level, analyzing how the preference varies with respect to the different quantiles and at the general level, highlighting on the preference map consumers with homogeneous behaviors with respect to the different quantiles.