Imagine that you have a friend who likes to read Harlequin novels. In case you don't know, Harlequin novels are romance stories. New ones come out every 2 - 4 weeks, and they sell for $3.00 to $4.00 per book. They are easy to read - many people read them instead of watching TV. Harlequin publishes several series of books, such as Superromance, Desire, etc. All the series follow the same publication and pricing strategy.

Imagine that your friend needs to choose one title from among the latest in five of the Harlequin lines. Your friend will choose based on five attributes that consumers consider important. These attributes are:

•  Intricacy of plot
•  Suspense and mystery
•  Bookcover and artwork
•  Sensual and erotic
•  Romance and fantasy
  

The five lines of Harlequin books are:

•  The Superromance Line
•  The Romance Line
•  The Desire Line
•  The Bestseller Line
•  The Temptation Line
  

In the table below, each line of books has been rated on their attributes. For example, the Superromance line has received a rating of 4 for "intricacy of plot", a 6 for "suspense and mystery". The rating scale for all five attributes ranges from 1 - 10, with 1 being "poor" and 10 being "excellent."

Instructions
Now you are going to make sense of how your friend makes decisions. For each attribute of a good romance novel, you need to decide the importance - or weight - of this attribute in the purchasing decision. You will weight the attributes by distributing points into the row called "Student Input Attribute Weight".

You have 100 points to distribute across that row. Please divide your 100 points across all five Harlequin novel attributes. Please give the most points to the attribute that is the most important to your friend, and less points to attributes that are less important to your friend. If you think that two or more attributes are equally important, then those attributes should get the same number of points. When finished, the points you distribute across the row should add up to 100.

After allocating the points, click the "Calculate" button to determine the overall score for each option. The table will identify the optimal choice by calculating a weighted score for each alternative. The Harlequin romance line with the highest calculated score wins.

• Was the result what you expected? Why or why not?
  

• If you change the attribute ratings, or if you change your own weighted input, you are likely to see changes in the final scores of the book lines. Go ahead, make changes a few times and see what happens. Click on Calculate every time you make changes.
  
  
• The winner depends on the weights and on the consumer preferences.

Some people believe that rational consumers should always make decisions by gathering all the relevant information and making all the necessary distinctions among their attribute preferences. And indeed some people do apply this method - often called the 'compensatory decision rule' - to some of their decisions, such as which summer internship to accept.

Gathering information and calculating weighted scores is a lot of work, however. Is it reasonable to expect that your friend will apply the compensatory rule when purchasing a romance novel? Would he or she ever apply it? Would your friend be more or less likely to apply it if he or she was from the U.S.? What if he or she was from Germany? Japan? China? India?

An alternative decision rule that consumers apply when choosing between products is the elimination-by-aspects or EBA rule. The EBA rule also takes into account the importance of the attributes, but the process in the EBA rule is different. To learn more about the EBA rule, visit Module 2.

If you want more experience with the compensatory rule, you can visit Module 3. There you can input alternatives, attributes, and ratings for each alternative on each attribute for any product category that you can imagine.