Situational choice experiments (SCE) differ from the choice-based conjoint experiments more commonly used in marketing research. While respondents still choose among the alternatives, the attributes and levels we have are invariant across those alternatives, because they describe the chooser, or the situation, not the alternatives. The archetypal example is physicians' choice of medications as a function of patient characteristics (which latter we create using an experimental design), but we've also modeled decisions like buy/lease/neither as a function of the item purchased and the financing options available or the choice of retire/work full-time/work part-time as a function of economic conditions for respondents nearing retirement age. After briefly introducing this kind of experiment, we’ll show how to design and program SCEs in Lighthouse Studio, then how to analyze them in our MBC software and how to simulate them in Excel.
