On the meaningfulness of testing preference axioms in stated preference discrete choice experiments.

A stream of studies on evaluation of health care services and public goods have developed tests of the preference axioms of completeness and transitivity and methods for detecting other preference phenomena such as unstability, learning- and tiredness effects, and random error, in stated preference discrete choice experiments. This methodological paper tries to identify the role of the preference axioms and other preference phenomena in the context of such experiments and discusses whether or how such axioms and phenomena can be subject to meaningful (statistical) tests.