A hierarchical model is developed to account for selection biases that result from processes in which events have a fixed probability of being sampled, but individuals in the population generate events at varying rates. It is shown that inferences about the population parameters from such...

Discrete choice models estimated using hypothetical choices made in a survey setting (i.e., choice experiments) are widely used to estimate the importance of product attributes in order to make product design and marketing mix decisions. Choice experiments allow the researcher to estimate...

Models of decision-making in multi-level, hierarchical systems in the literature have been restricted to structures where the system is strictly pyramidal in nature. We will show that this restriction has been self-imposed and that existing models can be modified to represent a wide range of...

Expert panels are playing an increasingly important role in U.S. health policy decision making. A fundamental issue in these applications is how to synthesize the judgments of individual experts into a group judgment. In this paper we propose an approach to synthesis based on Bayesian...

We provide a generic Monte Carlo method to find the alternative of maximum expected utility in a decision analysis. We define an artificial distribution on the product space of alternatives and states, and show that the optimal alternative is the mode of the implied marginal distribution on the...

The factor model is an important construct for both portfolio managers and researchers in modern finance. For practitioners, factor model coefficients are used to guide the construction of optimal portfolios. For academicians, factor model parameters play a fundamental role in explaining...

A common objective of social science and business research is the modeling of the relationship between demographic/psychographic characteristics of individuals and the likelihood of certain behaviors for these same individuals. Frequently, data on actual behavior are unavailable; rather, one has...

Empirical evidence suggests that decision makers often weight successive additional units of a valued attribute or monetary endowment unequally, so that their utility functions are intrinsically nonlinear or irregularly shaped. Although the analyst may impose various functional specifications...