Technical Note—Price as an Aspect of Choice in EBA

Elimination By Aspects (EBA) is a feature-based, psychological processing model of choice whose potential for customer decision modeling has not been exploited. One of several barriers to econometric application of the theory is the lack of an explicit framework for incorporating quantitative variables, such as price. The present study discusses a theoretical treatment of price within EBA which also serves as a guide to the treatment of other quantitative variables. Specifically, it is proposed that prices be represented as a sequence of nested price feature sets, in which the price feature set of an alternative is included in the price feature sets of all lower priced alternatives. The formal consequences of this representation are examined. Some predictions from the theory are tested on customer choice data.