Suchergebnisse

Social scientists are often confronted with theories in which one or more actors make choices over a discrete set of options. In this article, I generalize a broad class of statistical discrete choice models, with both well-known and new nonstrategic and strategic special cases. I demonstrate how to derive statistical models from theoretical discrete choice models and, in doing so, I address the statistical implications of three sources of uncertainty: agent error, private information about payoffs, and regressor error. For strategic and some nonstrategic choice models, the three types of uncertainty produce different statistical models. In these cases, misspecifying the type of uncertainty leads to biased and inconsistent estimates, and to incorrect inferences based on estimated probabilities.

This paper presents the results of a choice experiment carried out from August to October 2000 on the visitors of the Galleria Borghese Museum, a worldwide known heritage site located in Rome. The main objective of this work is to study the relevancy of choice experiment techniques as a tool aimed at measuring economic values and assessing user preferences concerning the multi‐attribute and multi‐value services as supplied by cultural institutions. A set of alternative incremental changes in service attributes showing improvements in supply are designed and presented to visitors. Alternative conditional logit specifications are used for analysing stated choices over the hypothetical incremental changes in museum attributes. Willingness to pay for incremental variations concerning site attributes is positive and statistically significant for most changes. Conditional logit specifications, which incorporate heterogeneity by adding interaction socio‐economic terms, are generally robust and do not violate the IIA assumption. In addition, in the present case study, non‐IIA models do not outperform conditional logit models. Choice experiments confirm as being a practical and effective tool for non‐market valuation, and they should be used to provide information to decision makers for justifying demand led policies.