Industrial marketing applications of quantum measurement techniques

The objective of the present work is to give a justification of the hierarchy formed by certain criteria that regulate industrial marketing based on a postacquisition evaluation of the product by users. The industrial market we consider is that of agricultural machinery, in particular the tractor. A test is designed with the items taking into consideration just the two marketing-related elements, product and price. These items define a latent variable "suitability" that will serve as the support for obtaining an empirical measure allowing a hieracrchy of the aforementioned criteria to be formed. The methodology used is Quantum Measurement a technique based on Rasch probability. The data used give a measure of suitability for each tractor and for each item, as well as an analysis of misfits that constitute a quality control for the data being considered. The resulting measure objectively corroborates the accepted hierarchy of industrial marketing criteria, and contributes the new result of a hierarchy of attributes corresponding to the tractor: (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.