Dear all,  

Please join us for the Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) this Wednesday, March 28 from 12.00 - 1.30 pm in CGIS Knafel Room 354. Teppei Yamamoto, Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at MIT, will give a presentation entitled "A Multinomial Response Model for Varying Choice Sets, with Application to Partially Contested Multiparty Elections". As always, a light lunch will be provided.

Abstract:  
This paper proposes a new multinomial choice model which explicitly takes into account variation in choice sets across observations. The proposed varying choice set logit model relaxes the independence of irrelevant alternatives assumption by allowing the individual random utility function to directly depend on choice set types, and can be applied to a variety of data in which some individuals can only choose from a subset of the theoretically possible responses. Both frequentist and Bayesian simulation-based estimation procedures are developed using the Monte Carlo expectation-maximization algorithm and Markov chain Monte Carlo, respectively. The proposed model can be used to analyze survey data in partially contested multiparty elections in which some political parties do not run their candidates in every district. For illustration, I apply the proposed method to the 1996 Japanese general election, where none of the districts was contested by all of the six major parties.


An up-to-date schedule for the workshop is available at http://www.iq.harvard.edu/events/node/1208.

Best,
Konstantin

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Konstantin Kashin
Ph.D. Student in Government
Harvard University

Mobile: 978-844-0538
E-mail: kkashin@fas.harvard.edu
Site: http://www.konstantinkashin.com/