Conjoint analysis is a market research tool used to understand how respondents develop preferences for products or services. It is based upon the premise that consumers evaluate the value or utility of a product or idea by combining the separate amounts of utility provided by each attribute. This type of analysis is unique in that the researcher first constructs a set of real or hypothetical products or services by combining selected levels of each attribute. These hypothetical products are then presented to respondents who provide only their overall evaluations. The researcher is simply asking the respondent to make choices and tradeoffs. Because the researcher pre-designed the "experiment", the importance of each attribute can be determined from the respondent's overall rating. Conjoint analysis can be used to develop segmentation strategies, profitability analysis, and simulation or what-if (sensitivity) experiments.