Introduction

In this chapter, we provide a detailed description of the case study alluded to throughout the book. You should already be familiar with aspects of the case study from your reading to date. The question for us was whether we detailed the case study early in the book, later in the book (as we have here) or discussed aspects of it throughout the book without ever providing the reader with a detailed overview of how the actual study proceeded.

Detailing the case study earlier in the book risked alienating the reader through the use of the expert language necessary to relate the hows and whys of the study. By leaving the detailed description to now, we feel that the reader should be equipped with a level of expertise in the language of choice to understand what actually occurred. We will, for this chapter, use the language of the expert (or, at least, the more informed). If you have absorbed the material in previous chapters, then what we write here should be easily understood.

Study objectives

The case study, the data for which we use in later chapters to demonstrate the more practical aspects of choice modeling, was part of a 1994 study into Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GGE) commissioned by the Australian Federal Government. An important feature of the GGE study was to develop a data base to describe the characteristics of the population of households and passenger vehicles in a base year.