Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Part I Basic topics
- 1 In the beginning
- 2 Basic notions of statistics
- 3 Choosing
- 4 Paradigms of choice data
- 5 Processes in setting up stated choice experiments
- 6 Choices in data collection
- 7 NLOGIT for applied choice analysis: a primer
- 8 Handling choice data
- 9 Case study: mode-choice data
- 10 Getting started modeling: the basic MNL model
- 11 Getting more from your model
- 12 Practical issues in the application of choice models
- Part II Advanced topics
- Glossary
- References
- Index
3 - Choosing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Part I Basic topics
- 1 In the beginning
- 2 Basic notions of statistics
- 3 Choosing
- 4 Paradigms of choice data
- 5 Processes in setting up stated choice experiments
- 6 Choices in data collection
- 7 NLOGIT for applied choice analysis: a primer
- 8 Handling choice data
- 9 Case study: mode-choice data
- 10 Getting started modeling: the basic MNL model
- 11 Getting more from your model
- 12 Practical issues in the application of choice models
- Part II Advanced topics
- Glossary
- References
- Index
Summary
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
(Noam Chomsky 1928–30)Introduction
Individuals are born traders. They consciously or sub-consciously make decisions by comparing alternatives and selecting an action which we call a choice outcome. As simple as the observed outcome may be to the decision maker (i.e. the chooser), the analyst who is trying to explain this choice outcome through some captured data will never have available all the information required to be able to explain the choice outcome fully. This challenge becomes even more demanding as we study the population of individuals, since differences between individuals abound.
If the world of individuals could be represented by one person, then life for the analyst would be greatly simplified because whatever choice response we elicit from that one person could be expanded to the population as a whole to get the overall number of individuals choosing a specific alternative. Unfortunately there is a huge amount of variability in the reasoning underlying decisions made by a population of individuals. This variability, often referred to as heterogeneity, is in the main not observed by the analyst. The challenge is to find ways of observing and hence measuring this variability, maximizing the amount of measured variability (or observed heterogeneity) and minimizing the amount of unmeasured variability (or unobserved heterogeneity).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Applied Choice AnalysisA Primer, pp. 62 - 87Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005