Informative priors that reflect the structure of the model can improve estimation when data are sparse, while "standard," noninformative priors can have unintended consequences. First, the authors discuss selecting informative priors for variances and introduce a conjugate prior for covariance matrices. The proposed prior is more flexible than the inverse Wishart without increasing computations…
Marketers often analyze multinomial choice from a set of branded products to learn about demand. Given a set of brands to study, the authors analyze three reasons why choices from strict subsets of the brands can contain more statistical information about demand than choices from all the brands in the study: First, making choices from smaller subsets is easier, so it is possible to use more cho…