When calibrating a brand choice model cross-sectionally, a measure of brand loyalty is often introduced into the utility function to account for differences in utility across households and over time. One of the most widely used measures of brand loyalty, proposed by Guadagni and Little (1983),...

Multinomial logit models, especially those calibrated on scanner data, often use explanatory variables that are nonlinear functions of the parameters to be estimated. A common example is the smoothing constant in an exponentially weighted brand loyalty variable. Such parameters cannot be...