background due to the importance and uniqueness of the characteristics of the health sector, one of the most important priorities of the ministry of health is measuring the efficiency and quality of services which are provided for the people who refer to the health sectors. in all health systems, responding to the needs and wishes of patients is a crucial priority. objectives the main purpose o...

Since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods System, exchange arrangements of countries have become flexible. Several attempts have been made to determine whether the theories of optimum currency areas adequately explain the choice of an exchange rate system. In this paper, the optimum currency area is retested. Using cross-section data, a regression analysis of the choice of an exchange rate syste...

A rich class of parametric models is proposed for discrete choice data based on the scale mixture of multivariate normal distributions. The multinomial probit model is a special case in the class. The new models can be implemented in a Bayesian framework without much difficulty because of their special connections to the multinomial probit model. A Gibbs sampler with data augmentation is used t...

Customer choice behavior, such as “buy-up” and “buy-down”, is an important phenomenon in a wide range of revenue management contexts. Yet most revenue management methodologies ignore this phenomenon or at best approximate it in a heuristic way. In this paper, we provide an exact and quite general analysis of this problem. Specifically, we analyze a single-leg yield management problem in which t...

The purpose of this study is to estimate structural elements of patients’ demand functions for healthcare facilities, particularly hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), towards the goal of answering questions about welfare gains earned from the introduction of ASCs. Spatial variation across patients and facilities, among other variables, is used for identification. Using data that co...

The Nested Multinomial Logit (NMNL) model is used extensively in modeling consumer choices among discrete alternatives when the number of alternatives is large. Unfortunately, applied researchers often find that estimated NMNL models fail to meet the Daly-ZacharyMcFadden (DZM) sufficient conditions for consistency with stochastic utility maximization. Borsch-Supan (1990) provides a relaxed set ...

In this paper, we study the properties of a recently proposed class of semiparametric discrete choice models (referred to as the Marginal Distribution Model), by optimizing over a family of joint error distributions with prescribed marginal distributions. Surprisingly, the choice probabilities arising from the family of Generalized Extreme Value models can be obtained from this approach, despit...

This paper proposes the use of a quasi-random sequence for the estimation of the mixed multinomial logit model. The mixed multinomial structure is a flexible discrete choice formulation which accommodates general patterns of competitiveness as well as heterogeneity across individuals in sensitivity to exogenous variables. The estimation of this model has been achieved in the past using the pseu...

The Multinomial Logit, discrete choice model of transport demand, has several restrictions when compared with the more general Multinomial Probit model. The most famous of these are that unobservable components of utilities should be mutually independent and homoskedastic. Correlation can be accommodated to a certain extent by the Hierarchical Logit model, but the problem of heteroskedasticity ...

When design decisions are informed by consumer choice models, uncertainty in choice model predictions creates uncertainty for the designer. We investigate the variation and accuracy of market share predictions by characterizing fit and forecast accuracy of discrete choice models for the US light duty new vehicle market. Specifically, we estimate multinomial logit models for 9000 utility functio...