Roselinde Kessels

• PhD in Applied Economics
• Associate Professor at Maastricht University

The COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the period when safe and protective vaccines became available, presented an excellent opportunity to investigate public preferences regarding how to ration a scarce, life-saving resource. It is important to understand which distributive strategies are preferred but, as this is an inherently normative matter, also...

In 1919 and 1921 Raymond Pearl published four empirical studies on the Spanish Flu epidemic in which he explored the factors that might explain the explosiveness and destructiveness of the epidemic in America’s largest cities. Using partial correlation coefficients he tried to isolate the net effects of the possible explanatory factors, such as gen...

Mixture choice experiments investigate people’s preferences for products composed of different ingredients. To ensure the quality of the experimental design, many researchers use Bayesian optimal design methods. Efficient search algorithms are essential for obtaining such designs. Yet, research in the field of mixture choice experiments is not exte...

Introduction: Previous work showed that young people prefer youth‐oriented mental health services that offer individual help in houses in urban areas, with short wait times and low costs. The present paper aims to examine which service options professionals working in social welfare or mental health services prefer for addressing young people's men...

Aim: Although the incidence of mental health problems is highest in young people, the majority do not seek help. Reducing the discrepancy between need for care and access to services requires an understanding of the user perspective, which is largely lacking. This study aimed to examine preferences for mental health service attributes and their rel...

Despite the popularity of choice experiments (CEs) for the valuation of environmental goods and services, some of its shortcomings have been only partially addressed by the literature. Among these, of particular saliency are the hypothetical nature of CEs and the lack of information on joint choices (e.g. choices made by couples) in traditional CEs...

AdDownloader is a Python package for downloading advertisements and their media content from the Meta Online Ad Library. With a valid Meta developer access token, AdDownloader automates the process of downloading relevant ads data and storing it in a user-friendly format. Additionally, AdDownloader uses individual ad links from the downloaded data...

BACKGROUND Accurate diagnosis of bedaquiline (BDQ) resistance remains challenging. A Bayesian approach expresses this uncertainty as a probability of BDQ resistance (prBDQ R ) with a 95% credible interval. We investigated how prBDQ R information influences BDQ prescribing decisions. METHOD We performed a discrete choice experiment with 55 internati...

AdDownloader is a Python package for downloading advertisements and their media content from the Meta Online Ad Library. With a valid Meta developer access token, AdDownloader automates the process of downloading relevant ads data and storing it in a user-friendly format. Additionally, AdDownloader uses individual ad links from the downloaded data...

In recent years, the increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes has posed a significant threat to coastal infrastructures, particularly the electricity supply system. In response to these challenges, several policies have been proposed to improve the resilience of electricity systems, specifically focusing on expediting the restoration o...

We study Dutch taxpayers’ preferences in designing a social welfare system. With help of a choice experiment we ask 2000 respondents to make choices between policy packages, characterized by different levels of income for welfare recipients, of obligations, of sanctions, of earnings and gifts disregards, and of taxes for the average Dutch household...

AdDownloader is a Python package for downloading advertisements and their media content from the Meta Online Ad Library. With a valid Meta developer access token, AdDownloader automates the process of downloading relevant ads data and storing it in a user-friendly format. Additionally, AdDownloader uses individual ad links from the downloaded data...

Background: Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) are frequently used to study preferences and quantify tradeoffs in decision making. It is important to understand how stable their results are. Objective: To investigate to what extent an extreme change in context, the COVID-19 pandemic, affected preferences for vaccine priority setting, as observed i...

Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) have become an often-used research method in food research due to their ability to uncover trade-offs made when choosing among multiple alternatives, especially when dealing with credence attributes. Insights into the main elements of the consumers’ decision-making process are key to informing both public and priv...

We examine the effects of receiving remittances on household saving behaviour and expenditure patterns in Vietnam. We consider the amount of saving, the saving rate, and the share of expenditure, as well as per capita expenditure on education, health, assets, house repairs, food, non-food, and utilities. We apply propensity score matching to data f...

Objectives The COVID-19 pandemic forms an unprecedented public health, economic, and social crisis. Uptake of vaccination is critical for controlling the pandemic. Nevertheless, vaccination hesitancy is considerable, requiring policies to promote uptake. We investigate Dutch citizens’ preferences for policies that aim to promote vaccination through...

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted people’s travel behaviour and introduced uncertainty in the demand for public transport. To investigate user preferences for travel by London Underground during the pandemic, we conducted a stated choice experiment among its pre-pandemic users (N=961). We analysed the collected data using multinomial a...

Governments regularly have to decide whether new vaccines should be adopted in their national immunization program. These choices imply complex trade-offs of epidemiological, medical and socio-economic criteria. We investigated how the population in Flanders (Belgium) wants their government to set vaccine-funding priorities. In December 2019, we ex...

Background Vaccination is generally considered the most direct way to restoring normal life after the outbreak of COVID-19, but the available COVID-19 vaccines are simultaneously embraced and dismissed. Mapping factors for vaccine hesitancy may help the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines and provide valuable insights for future pandemics. Objectives We...

In the face of limited COVID‐19 vaccine supply, governments have had to identify priority groups for vaccination. In October 2020, when it was still uncertain whether COVID‐19 vaccines would be shown to work in trials, we conducted a discrete choice experiment and a best‐worst ranking exercise on a representative sample of 2060 Belgians in order to...

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted people's travel behaviour and out-of-home activity participation. While countermeasures are being eased with increasing vaccination rates, the demand for public transport remains uncertain. To investigate user preferences to travel by London Underground during the pandemic, we conducted a stated choice...

Background High uptake of Covid-19 vaccination is required to reach herd immunity. Methods A representative sample of 2,060 Belgians were surveyed in October 2020. Regression analyses identified the predictors associated with willingness to get vaccinated against Covid-19, and attitudes toward vaccination in general. Results 34% of the participan...

Increased vaccine hesitancy and refusal negatively affects vaccine uptake, leading to the reemergence of vaccine preventable diseases. We aim to quantify the relative importance of factors people consider when making vaccine decisions for themselves, or for their child, with specific attention for underlying motives arising from context, such as re...

Objectives Our study investigates the extent to which uptake of a COVID-19 digital contact-tracing (DCT) app among the Dutch population is affected by its configurations, its societal effects, and government policies toward such an app. Methods We performed a discrete choice experiment among Dutch adults including 7 attributes, that is, who gets a...

Despite its essential role in the delivery of ecosystem services, forest soil biodiversity experiences pressures, especially of anthropogenic origin. Forest management can harm or support soil biodiversity, depending on the management decisions taken, but currently generally overlooks soils. Management decisions considerably depend on public opinio...

Background Increased vaccine hesitancy and refusal negatively affects vaccine uptake leading to vaccine preventable disease reemergence. We aimed to quantify the relative importance of characteristics people consider when making vaccine decisions for themselves, or for their child, with specific attention for underlying motives arising from context...

In addition to more narrow criteria such as safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, vaccines can also be evaluated based on broader criteria such as their economic impact, contribution to disease eradication objectives, caregiver aspects, financial protection offered, equity or social acceptability. We summarize a survey executed in a sample...

Background: Several studies have confirmed the existence of a significant positive relationship between income and health. Conventional regression techniques such as Ordinary Least Squares only help identify the effect of the covariates on the mean of the health variable. In this way, important information of the income-health relationship could b...

Background: To optimize the focus of future public information campaigns in The Netherlands promoting the uptake of vaccines among adults and children, we quantified the contribution of several attributes to the vaccination decision. Method: We performed a discrete choice experiment (DCE) among Dutch adults including six attributes, i.e. vaccine...

Compared to other transport modes, coach transport continues to have a limited share in long-distance travel. Nevertheless, this can change due to the recent liberalization of the coach market in many West European countries. In this paper, we analyse if long-distance travellers could be interested in coach transport, and which service characterist...

Winter peaks in Belgian electricity demand are significantly higher than the summer peaks, creating a greater potential for imbalances between demand and supply. This potential is exacerbated because of the risk of outages in its ageing nuclear power plants, which are being phased out in the medium term. This paper conducts a choice experiment to i...

This paper presents a new regression‐based decomposition of socioeconomic inequality of health that is more direct than other approaches. The method can be applied to both rank‐dependent and level‐dependent indicators of inequality. The response variable of our regression model is a simple reformulation of the measure of overall performance of an i...

In a publicly financed health system, it is important that priority-setting reflects social values. Many studies investigate public preferences through surveys taken from samples, but to be representative, these samples must reflect value judgments of all relevant population subgroups. In this study, we explore whether, next to better-understood so...

To increase vaccination coverage, it is essential to understand the vaccine decision-making process. High population coverage is required to obtain herd immunity and to protect vulnerable groups in terms of age (e.g. the very young) or health (e.g. immunodeficiency). Vaccine confidence and coverage in South Africa are relatively low, opening the wi...

Vaccination programs generate direct protection, herd protection and, occasionally, side effects, distributed over different age groups. This study elicits the general public's view on how to balance these outcomes in funding decisions for vaccines. We performed an optimal design discrete choice experiment with partial profiles in a representative...

Using maximum likelihood (ML) estimation for discrete choice modeling of small datasets causes two problems. The first problem is that the data may exhibit separation, in which case the ML estimates do not exist. Also, provided they exist, the ML estimates are biased. In this paper, we show how to adapt Firth's penalized likelihood estimation for u...

From the middle of the 1990s, the traditional coach industry in Western Europe has been in decline. However, recent regulatory changes have created new opportunities in the sector of scheduled intercity services, resulting in fast growth of both coach lines and passengers traveling on these lines. Until now, operators have persuaded a public consis...

It is essential for public health to understand what drives people's hesitance towards vaccination. Theoretical models of vaccination decisions are ubiquitous, often incorporating herd immunity, perceptions of vaccine-related side-effects (VRSE) and of vaccine-preventable burden of disease, but with little to no empirical exploration. Herd immunity...

The main purpose of this paper is to compare the decomposition properties of rank-dependent and level-dependent indicators of income-related inequality of health. We do so by focusing on the decomposition by population groups. We show that level-dependent indices have more desirable subgroup decomposability properties than rank-dependent indices. T...

Collective housing or cohousing has gained popularity in the housing market because it promotes social, economic and environmental sustainability, and contributes to a better quality of life. While young professionals are increasingly choosing for peer-shared housing, student expectations are increasing with regard to personal space and comfort. Fo...

We suggest an alternative way to construct a family of indices of socioeconomic inequality of health. Our indices belong to the broad category of linear indices. In contrast to rank-dependent indices, which are defined in terms of the ranks of the socioeconomic variable and the levels of the health variable, our indices are based on the levels of b...

We present a flexible structural equation modeling (SEM) framework for the regression-based decomposition of rank-dependent indicators of socioeconomic inequality of health and compare it with simple ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. The SEM framework forms the basis for a proper use of the most prominent one- and two-dimensional decompositi...

Some recent attempts on constructing heterogeneous designs for stated choice experiments where different respondents or groups of respondents get different subdesigns have proven successful. Compared to homogeneous designs where all respondents get the same choice sets, heterogeneous designs allow for more variation in the attribute levels resultin...

Stated choice experiments are conducted to identify the attributes that drive people’s preferences when choosing between competing options. They are widely used in transportation in order to support the decision making of companies and governmental authorities. A large number of attributes might increase the complexity of the choice task in a choic...

In this paper, we analyze the origin–destination airport choice for freighter operations of combination and all-cargo carriers in Europe. First, we discuss the choice process of airlines qualitatively. Next, using a stated choice experiment, we show that the presence of forwarders at an airport is the primary factor in explaining airlines’ choices,...

Many developed countries are reforming healthcare payment systems in order to limit costs and improve clinical outcomes. Knowledge on how different groups of professional stakeholders trade off the merits and downsides of healthcare payment systems is limited. Using a discrete choice experiment we asked a sample of physicians, policy makers, health...

Setting fair health care priorities counts among the most difficult ethical challenges our societies are facing. To elicit through a discrete choice experiment the Belgian adult population's (18-75 years; N = 750) preferences for prioritizing health care and investigate whether these preferences are different for prevention versus cure. We used a B...

In many discrete choice experiments set up for product innovation, the number of attributes is large, which results in a substantial cognitive burden for the respondents. To reduce the cognitive burden in such cases, Green suggested in the early '70s the use of partial profiles that vary only the levels of a subset of the attributes. In this paper,...

In this chapter we explore different ways to obtain decompositions of rank-dependent indices of socioeconomic inequality of health, such as the Concentration Index. Our focus is on the regression-based type of decomposition. Depending on whether the regression explains the health variable, or the socioeconomic variable, or both, a different decompo...

Unlabelled: To test the hypothesis that care typology-being complex and highly unpredictable versus being clear-cut and highly predictable-guides healthcare payment preferences of physicians, policy makers, healthcare executives, and researchers. We collected survey data from 942 stakeholders across Canada, Europe, Oceania, and the United States....

In a discrete choice experiment, each respondent chooses the best product or service sequentially from many groups or choice sets of alternative goods. The alternatives, called pro¯les, are described by level combinations from a set of prede¯ned attributes. Respondents sometimes make their choices on the basis of only one dominant attribute rather...

In a discrete choice experiment, each respondent chooses the best product or service sequentially from many groups or choice sets of alternative goods. The alternatives are described by levels of a set of predefined attributes and are also referred to as profiles. Respondents often find it difficult to trade off prospective goods when every attribu...

Recently, the use of Bayesian optimal designs for discrete choice experiments, also called stated choice experiments or conjoint choice experiments, has gained much attention, stimulating the development of Bayesian choice design algorithms. Characteristic for the Bayesian design strategy is that it incorporates the available information about peop...

Recently, the use of Bayesian optimal designs for discrete choice experiments, also called stated choice experiments or conjoint choice experiments, has gained much attention, stimulating the development of Bayesian choice design algorithms. Characteristic for the Bayesian design strategy is that it incorporates the available information about peop...

We propose a simple strategy to construct D-, A-, G- and V-optimal two-level designs for rating-based conjoint studies with large numbers of attributes. In order to simplify the rating task, the designs hold one or more attributes at a constant level in each profile set. Our approach combines orthogonal designs and binary incomplete block designs w...

Recently, Kessels et al. (2006) developed a way to produce Bayesian G- and V-optimal designs for the multinomial logitmodel. These designs allow for precise response predictions which is the goal of conjoint choice experiments. The authors showed that the G- and V- optimality criteria outperform the D- and A-optimality criteria for prediction. Howe...

In this paper, we argue that some of the prior parameter distributions used in the literature for the construction of Bayesian optimal designs are internally inconsistent. We rectify this error and provide practical advice on how to properly specify the prior parameter distribution. Also, we present two pertinent examples to illustrate that Bayesia...

In conjoint experiments, each respondent receives a set of profiles to rate. Sometimes, the profiles are expensive prototypes that respondents have to test before rating them. Designing these experiments involves determining how many and which profiles each respondent has to rate and how many respondents are needed. To that end, the set of profiles...

To date, no attempt has been made to design efficient choice experiments by means of the G- and V-optimality criteria. These criteria are known to make precise response predictions, which is exactly what choice experiments aim to do. In this article, the authors elaborate on the G- and V-optimality criteria for the multinomial logit model and compa...

In this paper, we propose a simple strategy to construct D-, A-, G- and V-optimal two-level multi-attribute designs for rating-based conjoint studies. Our approach combines orthogonal designs and balanced or partially balanced incomplete block designs. In order not to overload respondents with complicated tasks, the designs hold one or more attribu...

Optimale Ontwerpen voor het Meten van Consumentenvoorkeuren Deze thesis handelt over het ontwerp van conjoint experimenten die gebru ikt worden om inzicht te verwerven in de afwegingen van consumenten bij het kiezen van producten en diensten. Marketing consultants en onderzoek ers voeren deze experimenten vaak uit om de voorkeuren voor toekomstige...

Water demand management is a key focus area for most water managers and even more so in developing countries since improved access to water is important to the poor. Different policies have been introduced to ensure a water management system th at cares for the poor, among them the Increasing Block Tariff (IBT) structure. Studies demonstrate that i...

The recent algorithm to find efficient conjoint choice designs, the RSC-algorithm developed by Sándor and Wedel (2001), uses Bayesian design methods that integrate the D-optimality criterion over a prior distribution of likely parameter values. Characteristic for this algorithm is that the designs satisfy the minimal level overlap property provided...

The scope of conjoint experiments on which we focus embraces those experiments in which each of the respondents receives a different set of profiles to rate. Carefully designing these experiments involves determining how many and which profiles each respondent has to rate and how many respondents are needed. To that end, the set of profiles offered...