We hope you can join us this Wednesday, March 28, 2012 for the Applied Statistics Workshop. Teppei Yamamoto, Assistant Professor from 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". A light lunch will be served at 12 pm and the talk will begin at 12.15.

"A Multinomial Response Model for Varying Choice Sets, with Application to Partially Contested Multiparty Elections"
Teppei Yamamoto
Department of Political Science, MIT
CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.)
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012 12.00 pm

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.

Posted by Konstantin Kashin at March 26, 2012 1:20 AM