Our study involved three stages of surveys with the application of both the direct questioning
and the conjoint analysis. The first stage survey attempted to identify an initial list of
potential service elements deemed important by shippers. Given the list of service elements
derived from the first stage, the second stage asked respondents to weigh the importance and
indicate their satisfaction associated with each service element. The last stage applied the
conjoint analysis to ask respondents to choose one of two hypothetical carriers with different
combinations of service attribute levels. The following sections will explain the data
collection, the analysis, and the results associated with each survey stage.