Good day, Matty.

I have successfully designed and analyzed hierarchical choice modelling experiments for structuring and bundling telco service contracts for small-to-medium and large business clients. The hierarchical choice modelling approach might suit the problem type as market contract choice might involve top-down hierarchical decisions, e.g. "I see you chose this alternative, which from this would you then choose?". A nice side-benefit is the generation of inclusive value estimates - an estimate of the value of including a sub-menu of options as a feature of a higher-level set of alternative choice attributes. A few nice features of the nested choice designs or sub-menus is that they often need no additional experimental design and add little in terms of participant cognition load and therefore overall completion time. They can often be implemented as a 'tick one or more' list, optionally displayed if a participant chooses a higher-level alternative, often with explicit additional option prices and, for online surveys, a dynamic price or cost implication summary of boxes ticked. Lastly they can model real choice contexts with better fit. Ever tried to buy a Subway (tm) sandwich? Ha! I have been thinking of, but not had success in gaining the funding to research, a similar problem of how best to structure self-funded irrigation schemes to optimize scheme success, and I thought the above approach could work. What do you think?

Cheers.

Damien

Thanks Damien! Very useful comment. I like the hierarchical choice modelling approach you suggest. In the meantime, we have designed and conducted our choice experiment. We simply used choice sets. But I may consider the hierarchical appraoch in the future! Thanks, Matty