Hello all,
We hope you can join us this Wednesday, November 28, 2012 for the final
Applied Statistics Workshop of the semester. Jens Hainmueller (Associate
Professor) and Teppei Yamamoto (Assistant Professor) from the Department of
Political Science at MIT will give a presentation entitled "Causal
Inference in Conjoint Analysis: Understanding Multi-Dimensional Choices via
Stated Preference Experiments". A light lunch will be served at 12 pm and
the talk will begin at 12.15.
Abstract:
For decades, market researchers have used conjoint
analysis to understand
how consumers make decisions when faced with multi-dimensional choices. In
such analyses, respondents are asked to score or rank a set of
alternatives, where each alternative is defined by multiple attributes
which are varied randomly or intentionally. Political scientists are
frequently interested in parallel questions about decision-making, yet to
date conjoint analysis has seen little use within the field. In this
manuscript, we demonstrate the potential value of conjoint analysis in
political science, using examples about vote choice and immigrant admission
to the United States. In doing so, we develop a set of statistical tools
for drawing causal conclusions from stated preference data based on the
potential outcomes framework of causal inference. We discuss the causal
estimands of interest and provide a formal analysis of the assumptions
required for identifying those quantities. Prior conjoint analyses have
typically used designs which limit the number of unique conjoint profiles.
We employ a survey experiment to compare this approach to a fully
randomized approach. Both our formal analysis of the causal estimands and
our empirical results highlight the potential biases of common approaches
to conjoint analysis which restrict the number of profiles.
An up-to-date schedule for the workshop is available at
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/events/node/1208.
Best,
Konstantin
--
Konstantin Kashin
Ph.D. Candidate in Government
Harvard University
Mobile: 978-844-0538
E-mail: kkashin(a)fas.harvard.edu
Site:
http://www.konstantinkashin.com/<http://people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Ekkashi…