Investigating cost non-attendance as a driver of inflated welfare estimates in mixed-logit models

IF 3.4 2区 经济学 Q1 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS & POLICY
Curtis Rollins
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Choice models are used by applied economists for many purposes, such as non-market valuation or estimating willingness to pay for novel food and product attributes. Mixed-logit models allow researchers to account for preference heterogeneity and complex decision-making processes when modelling choices. In mixed-logit models, parameters of monetary attributes such as prices typically are assumed to follow a negative lognormal random distribution to ensure that the marginal utility of a price increase is strictly negative. However, this practice can cause means and standard deviations of welfare estimates to ‘explode’ to unfeasibly large levels, as the model assumes there are some marginal utilities of cost approaching zero. This paper examines whether cost non-attendance, which occurs when respondents ignore costs in stated-preference studies, could be a cause of inflated welfare estimates when a lognormal cost parameter is used. A two-class equality-constrained latent-class model is proposed, in which the cost parameter is fixed at zero for a cost non-attender class and is specified as a random lognormal parameter for cost attenders. This proposed model produces mean welfare estimates that are 17 times lower than a mixed-logit model with a lognormal cost parameter, and 10% lower than a model with a non-random cost parameter. These results suggest that cost non-attendance can result in inflated welfare estimates when employing a lognormal cost parameter, and that accounting for cost non-attendance could be a simple, parsimonious solution to this problem.

在混合logit模型中,调查成本非考勤作为膨胀福利估计的驱动因素
选择模型被应用经济学家用于许多目的,例如非市场评估或估计购买新食品和产品属性的意愿。混合logit模型允许研究人员在建模选择时考虑偏好异质性和复杂的决策过程。在混合logit模型中,货币属性(如价格)的参数通常假设遵循负对数正态随机分布,以确保价格上涨的边际效用严格为负。然而,这种做法可能导致福利估计的均值和标准差“爆炸”到不可行的大水平,因为模型假设有一些边际效用的成本接近于零。本文研究了当使用对数正态成本参数时,当受访者忽略了状态偏好研究中的成本时,是否会出现成本不出席,这可能是夸大福利估计的原因。提出了一个两类等价约束的潜在类模型,其中代价类的代价参数固定为零,代价类的代价参数指定为随机对数正态参数。该模型产生的平均福利估计比具有对数正态成本参数的混合logit模型低17倍,比具有非随机成本参数的模型低10%。这些结果表明,当采用对数正态成本参数时,不出勤成本可能导致夸大的福利估计,并且对不出勤成本进行核算可能是这个问题的一个简单,节俭的解决方案。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Journal of Agricultural Economics
Journal of Agricultural Economics 管理科学-农业经济与政策
CiteScore
7.90
自引率
2.90%
发文量
48
审稿时长
>24 weeks
期刊介绍: Published on behalf of the Agricultural Economics Society, the Journal of Agricultural Economics is a leading international professional journal, providing a forum for research into agricultural economics and related disciplines such as statistics, marketing, business management, politics, history and sociology, and their application to issues in the agricultural, food, and related industries; rural communities, and the environment. Each issue of the JAE contains articles, notes and book reviews as well as information relating to the Agricultural Economics Society. Published 3 times a year, it is received by members and institutional subscribers in 69 countries. With contributions from leading international scholars, the JAE is a leading citation for agricultural economics and policy. Published articles either deal with new developments in research and methods of analysis, or apply existing methods and techniques to new problems and situations which are of general interest to the Journal’s international readership.
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