A method for evaluating and selecting field experiment locations

When marketing researchers perform field experiments, it is crucial that the experimental location and the control location are comparable. At present, it is difficult to assess the comparability of field locations because there is no way to distinguish differences between locations that are due to random versus systematic factors. To accomplish this, we propose a methodology that enables field researchers to evaluate and select optimal field locations by parsing these random versus systematic effects. To determine the accuracy of our proposed methodology, we performed computer simulations with 10,000 cases per simulation. The simulations demonstrate that accuracy increases as the number of data points increases and as consistency increases.