The role of preference axioms and respondent behaviour in statistical models for discrete choice

Discrete choice experiments are widely used in relation to health care. A stream of recent literature therefore aims at testing the validity of the underlying preference axioms of completeness and transitivity, and detecting other preference phenomena such as unstability, learning/tiredness e¤ects, ordering e¤ects, dominance, etc. Unfortunately there seems to be some confusion about what is actually being tested, and the link between the statistical tests performed and the relevant underlying model of respondent behaviour has not been explored in this literature. The present paper tries to clarify the notions involved and discuss what can be tested in a general frequency of choice framework and more speci…cally in a random utility model.