Consumer preferences can be formed in different ways. In some cases, buyers directly compare alternatives across various attributes and choose the one they most prefer. In other situations, consumers evaluate each option separately and then pick the one that is judged most favorably. It has traditionally been assumed in marketing and decision research that preferences are invariant across such preference formation and elicitation methods (Tversky, Sattath, & Slovic, 1988). For example, the proportion of consumers who indicate (in a rating task) a higher purchase likelihood for Brand A than for Brand B is expected to be similar to the proportion of consumers who prefer Brand A over B in a choice task. Accordingly, marketing researchers have employed a variety of techniques for assessing and predicting consumer preferences, such as choice, rating, ranking, and matching (e.g., Urban & Hauser, 1993).

A question that naturally arises is whether alternative preference elicitation tasks generate the same preferences or whether they lead to systematically different preferences or “preference reversals.” Tversky et al. (1988) demonstrate a systematic discrepancy between choice and value-matching whereby an alternative that is superior on the more prominent dimension (and significantly inferior on a second dimension) is more likely to be preferred in choice. Prior research also examines the differences between judgment and choice (e.g., Billings & Scherer, 1988; Ganzach, 1995; Montgomery, Selart, Gärling, & Lindberg, 1994; Payne, 1982) as well as between attribute- and attitude-based preferences (Sanbonmatsu & Fazio, 1990; Sanbonmatsu, Kardes, & Gibson, 1991).