Poster presented at LEEPin2019 in Exeter

I gave a poster presentation titled: “The effect of device experience and time of day on stated preferences” at the LEEPin2019 Conference on 24th - 26th of June 2019 at the University of Exeter. The working paper, on which the poster is based, is concerned with the response quality of people answering stated preference surveys on their mobile phones compared to a desktop computer. We use the number of surveys a given respondent has answered on each device as a proxy for experience answering surveys on a particular device.

June 26, 2019 Read
Presentation at ICMC2019 in Kobe

I gave a presentation at the International Choice Modeling Conference (ICMC) in Kobe. The title of the presentation was “An information search approach to discrete choice analysis”. This post is copied with permission from ACRG. Abstract As choice modelers we observe decision makers’ choices among competing alternatives, and we try to come up with a model that best describes the observed choice behavior. The economic model of the rational utility maximizer is still pervasive.

June 26, 2019 Read
Seminar with HERU in Aberdeen

I was invited to give a seminar in the Health Economics Research Group (HERU) seminar series in Aberdeen on the 31st of May 2019. The title of the talk was: “The search for something better - A consideration set model”. The role that information search plays in economic decision making has long been recognized. The seminar focused on how the search for new information about alternatives plays an important part in how consideration sets are formed, i.

May 31, 2019 Read
The purpose of the blog

With the new and revamped website, I have decided to start a blog. I am not a very experienced blogger and was introduced to the concept of having one through the INSPiRE project. To me, the blog will be a pathway to impact. A place where I can provide a more personal opinion on the research that I, and my colleagues, do. Much of the work that I do focuses on the use of advanded choice models to understand better how people make decisions in markets (both real and hypothetical).

April 11, 2019 Read
New position as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow with the University of Stirling

Today I started my new position as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow with the University of Stirling. The position is for 2 years and is part of the INSPiRE Project. The project is funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 - Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individaul Fellowship program. The project is in collaboration with Professor Danny Campbell. I have worked extensively with Professor Campbell in the past, and I am exited to continue that work now in Stirling.

November 1, 2018 Read
New publication in Environmental and Resource Economics

Stated preference practitioners are increasingly relying on internet panels to gather data, but emerging evidence suggests potential limitations with respect to respondent and response quality in such panels. We identify groups of inattentive respondents who have failed to watch information videos provided in the survey to completion. Our results show that inattentive respondents have a higher cost sensitivity, are more likely to have a small scale parameter, and are more likely to ignore the non-cost attributes.

October 25, 2018 Read
Paper presented at the World Congress for Environmental and Resource Economists

I presented the working paper “Assessing the impact of ‘professional’ respondents using an integrated choice and latent variable model” at the 6th World Congress for Environmental and Resource Economists in Gothenburg. The paper addresses a concern among stated preference practioners relying on online panels to gather data, that some panel members may have substantial experience with answering surveys and that they are “in it for the money”. While not inherently bad or irrational, if these respondents are motivated only by the monetary compensation, and engage in simplifying survey behavior to obtain the compensation with the least amount of effort, then this may lead to poorer data quality.

July 30, 2018 Read
New publication in European Review of Agricultural Economics

Accumulating evidence suggests that respondents in stated choice experiments use simplifying strategies. Such behaviour is a deviation from random utility theory and can lead to wrong inferences regarding preferences. This is a first attempt to systematically explore satisficing in stated choice experiments. We consider 944 satisficing rules and allow respondents to revise the rules adopted throughout the choice sequence. Only a minority of respondents used the same satisficing rule across the entire sequence.

July 20, 2018 Read
New publication in Energy Economics

In this paper, we report on a discrete choice experiment aimed at eliciting Swedish households’ willingness-to-accept a compensation for restrictions on household electricity and heating use during peak hours. When analyzing data from discrete choice experiments it is typically assumed that people make rational utility maximizing decisions, i.e., that they consider all of the attribute information and compare all alternatives. However, mounting evidence shows that people use a wide range of simplifying strategies that are inconsistent with utility maximization.

May 8, 2018 Read
Taught Discrete Choice Analysis in R in Karlsruhe

I taught the course Discrete Choice Analysis with R for researchers at the Europäisches Institut für Energieforschnung (EIfER) EDF-KIT from the 8th - 12th of October 2018. The three day course covered introduction to stated preference experimental design and analysis of discrete choice data. Each day started with 3 hours of lectures in the morning followed by 3 hours of hands-on work after lunch.

April 17, 2018 Read
New publication in Journal of Choice Modeling

When analyzing discrete choice data we assume that respondents compare alternatives and make a utility maximizing choice. The majority of DCEs use a matrix display with one row per attribute and one column per alternative. A comparison by alternatives implies that respondents process the choice task column-by-column. However, evidence from psychology and judgment and decision making research suggest that learned reading patterns dominate and as such the standard matrix display might induce processing by attributes rather than alternatives.

February 17, 2018 Read
New publication in Ocean and Coastal Management

It is well-known that operating within the boundaries of a national park provides commercial actors with the opportunity to charge a price premium, though this has to a lesser degree been demonstrated for marine protected areas. We estimate national tourists' willingness-to-pay a price premium for boat trips in the Nha Trang Bay Marine Protected Are, Vietnam, using a discrete choice experiment. Our results show that tourists are willing to pay an average price premium of 18 USD per trip for a large improvement in environmental quality, and that avoiding the loss of jobs for local fishermen is of minor importance.

May 18, 2017 Read