Kafka Lives: Reflections on Expert Panels, Choice Based Conjoint, and the World of Testing

Abstract

We defend with irrational vigor what we scarcely understand with intellectual acuity. More than two hundred years ago that most magisterial of all historians, Edward S. Gibbon, presented to the English speaking world a long, oft-wrenching, occasionally pontificating history of the Roman Empire, how it grew, how it fell from the internal weaknesses and from the gathering of those barbarians from the outside ready to breach its walls at every sign of weakness. In stentorian language, majestic tone, cadenced phrasing, Gibbon captured the slow decay, the rot, the eruptions, but of course the inevitable splintering and disappearance of the Roman Empire, that most magnificent of man’s temporal institution, now long scattered on the sands of time. Anyone reading Gibbon with soul awaiting a dollop of sadness for the slow funereal death of this grand dame waits, like Godot. It doesn’t happen, at least at any one place. It happens though, for the death of Rome protracts over a millennium. Plenty of time for the masses to become acclimated, indifferent to their fate. What does Gibbon have to teach today’s researchers, and for that matter what is Kafka’s parable about the law doing as the introductory to this note? Good questions, possibly somewhat not so pleasant answers. We deal in this note with two areas that could take lessons from Kafka and Gibbon. These are expert panel profiling of perceptions and choice-based conjoint analysis of product or service options.