What You Don’t Know Might Hurt You: Some Unresolved Issues in the Design and Analysis of Discrete Choice Experiments

The papers and comments in this issue focus on four broad areas related to understanding and modeling choices: (1) The use of laboratory experiments to improve valuation methods; (2) The design of stated preference choice set and choice occasions; (3) Latent class models as means of identifying and accommodating preference heterogeneity; and (4) Accommodating uncertainty about the “true” model, modeling ranking and rating tasks and pooling data sources. In what follows I offer some comments on each area, and briefly discuss several unresolved issues associated with each area, closing with some comments about future research opportunities. Copyright Springer 2006