Assessing Industrial Buyer Preferences: Using the Swait-Louviere Test to Test the Key Informant Assumption

When using professional buyers to study an organization’s buying behavior an important consideration is whether their preferences reflect those of the organization. Since this is a key informant problem, the present article focuses on the issue of the degree to which key informants can be used to provide insights into their own organization’s preferences. We conduct a direct test of the key informant assumption using the Swait-Louviere test. In this test preferences from a choice experiment using actual buyers, and from market decisions made by the organization, are estimated separately, then jointly in multinomial logit models. We found that buyers’ experimental preferences were similar to estimates obtained from the market decisions. Buyers’ preferences were closer to the intuitive preferences of the organization’s top executives than the estimates based on past market decisions, although a model based on the combined data outperformed either. We discuss the implications of these results for industrial buying research. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004