Maksat Jumamyradov, Benjamin M. Craig, William H. Greene, Murat Munkin
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
In discrete choice experiments (DCEs), differences between respondents’ preferences may be associated with observable or unobservable factors. Unobservable heterogeneity, related to latent factors associated with the choices of individuals, may be modelled using correlated (i.e. informative heterogeneity) or uncorrelated (i.e. uninformative heterogeneity) individual-specific parameters of a logit model. In this study, we simulated unobservable heterogeneity among DCE respondents and compared the results of the maximum simulated likelihood (MSL) estimation of the mixed logit model when correctly specified and mis-specified. These results show that the MSL estimates are biased and can differ greatly from the true parameters, even when correctly specified. Before estimating a mixed logit model, we highly recommend that choice modellers conduct simulation analyses to assess the potential extent of biases before relying on the MSL estimates, particularly their variances and correlations, and then ultimately determine which model specification produces the least bias.
期刊介绍：
Computational Economics, the official journal of the Society for Computational Economics, presents new research in a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field that uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex problems from all branches in economics. The topics of Computational Economics include computational methods in econometrics like filtering, bayesian and non-parametric approaches, markov processes and monte carlo simulation; agent based methods, machine learning, evolutionary algorithms, (neural) network modeling; computational aspects of dynamic systems, optimization, optimal control, games, equilibrium modeling; hardware and software developments, modeling languages, interfaces, symbolic processing, distributed and parallel processing
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