HOW DO RESPONDENTS HANDLE STATED CHOICE EXPERIMENTS? INFORMATION PROCESSING STRATEGIES UNDER VARYING INFORMATION LOAD

Four ordered heterogeneous logit and mixed logit models are developed, each for a fixed-attribute design, in which the dependent variable is the difference between the maximum (fixed) number of attributes in the design and the actual number that were maintained by the respondent in their information processing strategy (IPS). The authors have found that individuals adopt a range of 'coping' or editing strategies that are consistent with how we normally process information in real markets. Importantly, we should not argue that more information is necessarily undesirable; indeed such information may be necessary to give meaning to a choice context even if an individual invokes an IPS that involves excluding specific attributes and even aggregating them. That is, individuals invoke procedural strategies in the form of rules that they draw on as useful devices to process information in real or hypothetical markets. The evidence suggests that aligning 'choice complexity' with the amount of information to process is misleading. Relevancy is what matters. (a)