Brand Choice and Purchase Frequency Revisited: An Application to Recreation Behavior

The role that total purchases play in determining the choice among brands has been considered in microeconomic theory for quite some time, but for traditional goods only. Consumption of outdoor recreation is an unusual good, most often measured using an individual's recreational trip. Adding the trips made on a number of choice occasions seems the obvious way to aggregate this good, but doing so leads to several problems in defining a meaningful price index. The Hicks-Leontief conditions for aggregation suggest that trips to destinations may be thought of as brand choices on consumption occasions, andthe continuous analogue to total purchases may in fact be the individual's total travel. An empirical example of the model is used to estimate welfare impacts for a group of anglers. Copyright 2000, Oxford University Press.