Compare methods

	Brand-Price Trade-Off	Discrete Choice Experiment
Field	Marketing Research	Marketing Research
Family	Process / pipeline	Regression model
Year of origin	1975	1983
Originator	British market-research practitioners (1970s); formalized within conjoint pricing (Bryan Orme)	Jordan J. Louviere & George Woodworth; Daniel McFadden (random utility theory)
Type	Sequential brand-at-price choice task for price elasticity and switching	Stated-preference experiment for estimating preferences and willingness to pay
Seminal source	Orme, B. K. (2020). Getting Started with Conjoint Analysis: Strategies for Product Design and Pricing Research (4th ed.). Madison, WI: Research Publishers LLC. ISBN: 9780972729772	Louviere, J. J., & Woodworth, G. (1983). Design and Analysis of Simulated Consumer Choice or Allocation Experiments: An Approach Based on Aggregate Data. Journal of Marketing Research, 20(4), 350-367.
Aliases	BPTO, Brand/Price Trade-Off, Brand-Price Trade-Off Analysis, Sequential Brand-Price Choice	DCE, Stated Choice Experiment, Stated-Preference Choice Experiment, Choice Experiment
Related	4	4
Summary	Brand-Price Trade-Off (BPTO) is a pricing-research technique that measures how consumers trade off brand preference against price by presenting competing brands at varying prices and asking, repeatedly, which one they would buy. In the classic procedure the respondent chooses a brand from a set shown at given prices, and then the chosen brand's price is raised in the next round, forcing successive choices until the respondent switches to a cheaper alternative or to none. The sequence of switch points reveals how much of a price premium each brand can command before customers defect, mapping brand loyalty and cross-brand switching. Developed by British market researchers in the 1970s and conceptually rooted in the price-perception work of Gabor and Granger, BPTO is in effect a constrained, sequential choice experiment focused on brand and price. Modern practice analyzes the resulting choices with a logit model under random utility theory, yielding brand utilities, price elasticities, and a simulator for share under different competitive price scenarios. It remains popular for fast-moving consumer goods where brand-versus-price is the dominant decision.	A discrete choice experiment (DCE) is a stated-preference method in which respondents repeatedly choose their preferred option from sets of alternatives described by systematically varied attributes, allowing the analyst to estimate how each attribute drives choice. Grounded in McFadden's random utility theory and operationalized for designed experiments by Louviere and Woodworth in 1983, the DCE treats each choice as the selection of the alternative with the highest latent utility and recovers the utility coefficients from observed choices. Because attributes are varied independently by experimental design, the method isolates the marginal effect of each attribute, including price, and yields marginal rates of substitution such as willingness to pay. DCEs are analyzed with multinomial (conditional) logit and, increasingly, with mixed and nested logit models that relax restrictive assumptions and capture preference heterogeneity. The approach is essentially the same machinery as choice-based conjoint but is the standard term in transport, health, and environmental economics, where it is used to value non-market goods. Its rigor and flexibility have made it a dominant stated-preference technique across the social sciences.