Martijn de Jong from the Erasmus University Rotterdam (NL) presented his work on assessing sensitive consumer behavior using the item count response technique in our <link marketing forschung research-seminar-series>Research Seminar Series.

In the course of his presentation, he elaborated on his proposal of a new technique and statistical model called “Item Count Response Technique” (ICRT) to assess the prevalence and drivers of sensitive consumer behavior. Sensitive behavior like illegal streaming, software downloading, etc. - though being quite common - forces consumers to likely not tell the truth when asked in a survey about it, which makes it very hard to assess it for researchers, marketing managers and policy makers. The proposed ICRT poses a solution for that problem. Along with the method itself, Martijn de Jong presented Monte Carlo simulations and a large scale application to self-reported cigarette consumption among pregnant women (n = 1,315) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the procedure.