Our standard HB model assumes respondent utilities are distributed multivariate normal. But constrained utilities are not likely multivariate normal, and in some cases this becomes problematic. For example, when one has ordinal levels that differ by an amount near 0. Most practitioners use point estimates of HB draws – the mean. Rather than using the mean of HB draws, we ignore problematic constraints during HB estimation and enforce constraints using the distribution of HB draws as a prior.
