A New Approach for Capturing and Potraying the Competitive Structure of a Market: An Application To The Bush-Kerry-Nader Presidential Contest

This short note introduces a new methodology for capturing and portraying the competitive structure of a market. Using the current Presidential contest as the context, the methodology first describes a simple and efficient data collection approach that generates the data necessary for applying Tversky’s Elimination-By-Aspects Model (1972a, 1972b) at the market level. Then, relying on recently published mathematical results (Batsell, Polking, Cramer, and Miller, 2003) the method shows the complete decomposition of the competitive structure of a market based on the elimination model. Also introduced is a new way to graphically portray the competitive structure of a market in the form of a choice-based perceptual map, which has several desirable properties.