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Abstract
One debate in economics centres on consumers’ decision-making strategies and
whether they should be explicitly considered. The default assumption for choice modelling
has been that all the attributes presented to respondents somehow influence their
choices. More recently, choice modelling research has begun examining how respondents
use information. This article presents research that focused on which pieces of
information respondents used in responding to a choice modelling survey. The use of
information by respondents was captured in the course of the administration of a computer-
aided survey, so the research did not rely on posterior self-reporting. Access to
the information was captured for each attribute of every alternative, which allowed
flexibility in assessing use of information. Three mixed logit models are presented,
based on three different assumptions about information use. The results suggest that
accounting for respondents’ information use affects modelling results, but the impact
on estimates of willingness to pay may be relatively small.