Applying theory from behavioural psychology, we demonstrate that product preferences are not “found” in people, but rather constructed by people on an as-needed basis. The demonstration explores the relationship between crux product attributes, which are both important and difficult for people to assess, and sentinel attributes, which are easy for people to assess and have a perceived associati...

Article history: Received 17 March 2011 Available online xxxx JEL classification: C72 C73

The studies described in the present paper extend the author s earlier work on testing the ‘‘independence condition’’ for decisions under risk to the ‘‘conjoint independence’’ for multi-attribute decisions. The ‘‘equate-to-differentiate’’ approach, which is proposed as a means by which weak dominance can be made applicable in more general cases in binary choice, is presented to account for the ...

This paper shows that many estimators of thresholds in ordered response models exist, because binary choice location estimators can be converted into threshold estimators. A new threshold estimator is proposed that is consistent under more general conditions. An extension to random thresholds is provided. JEL codes: C14, C25, C13.

This paper describes the derivation and the econometric calibration of a joint time assignment – mode choice model with a microeconomic foundation, to be applied to the TASTI (Time ASsignment Travel and Income) database. The econometric procedure is a full information maximum likelihood with three nonlinear continuous equations and one discrete choice. We use Lee’s transformation to include cor...