Discrete choice analysis of health worker job preferences in Ethiopia: separating attribute non-attendance from taste heterogeneity

Nikita Arora, Matthew Quaife, Kara Hanson, Mylène Lagarde, Dorka Woldesenbet, Abiy Seifu and Romain Crastes dit Sourd

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: When measuring preferences, discrete choice experiments (DCEs) typically assume that respondents consider all available information before making decisions. However, many respondents often only consider a subset of the choice characteristics, a heuristic called attribute non-attendance (ANA). Failure to account for ANA can bias DCE results, potentially leading to flawed policy recommendations. While conventional latent class logit models have most commonly been used to assess ANA in choices, these models are often not flexible enough to separate non-attendance from respondents’ low valuation of certain attributes, resulting in inflated rates of ANA. In this paper, we show that semi-parametric mixtures of latent class models can be used to disentangle successfully inferred non-attendance from respondent’s ‘weaker’ taste sensitivities for certain attributes. In a DCE on the job preferences of health workers in Ethiopia, we demonstrate that such models provide more reliable estimates of inferred non-attendance than the alternative methods currently used. Moreover, since we find statistically significant variation in the rates of ANA exhibited by different health worker cadres, we highlight the need for well-defined attributes in a DCE, to ensure that ANA does not result from a weak experimental design.

Keywords: attribute non-attendance; Preference heterogeneity; discrete choice experiment; health workers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C01 C35 D01 D80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm and nep-ecm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Health Economics, 17, February, 2022. ISSN: 1057-9230

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