What You Don’t Know Might Hurt You: Some Unresolved Issues in the Design and Analysis of Discrete Choice Experiments

Abstract

The papers and comments in this issue focus on four broad areas related to understanding and modeling choices: (1) The use of laboratory experiments to improve valuation methods; (2) The design of stated preference choice set and choice occasions; (3) Latent class models as means of identifying and accommodating preference heterogeneity; and (4) Accommodating uncertainty about the “true” model, modeling ranking and rating tasks and pooling data sources. In what follows I offer some comments on each area, and briefly discuss several unresolved issues associated with each area, closing with some comments about future research opportunities. Copyright Springer 2006