Search

People differ in what they want and why they want it, and individual-level differences in preference lead companies to make an effort to develop diverse products and identify market segmentation in order to satisfy consumer demands in the marketplace. In this sense, we examine two avenues of preference measurement in choice models that require a deep understanding of the nature of heterogeneity. We especially work on improving inferences about preferences by identifying attributes that play an essential role in benefit formation through interaction detection and by providing a more complete picture of demand through data integration at the individual-respondent level. First, we focus on how consumers perceive benefit when some attributes are benefit enabling in the sense that their presence signals that an offering is responsive to a need, while their absence indicates that the product is not responsive. The identification of product attributes and features that are essential for a benefit to exist is critical to new product development and formulation. Second, we investigate the origin of consumer's different preferences (e.g., motivation) to link the objects and drivers of their want at the individual-level through an integrated model of text, scaled response, and choice data. Together, two essays will help us to deeply understand consumer's different preferences based on the structure of perceiving benefits from the product and a coherent story of demand through integrated results of different data.

The dissertation explores the trope of lost and recovered children in the narratives of nationalism by Victorian women writers excluded from political participation. Bringing together the narratives of fragmented family and divided allegiance, my project focuses on how women writers constructed an imagined connection with other people's nationalism by subverting deracinated fantasy to explore the tensions between the individual and racial inheritance. Examining the cultural construction of Italians, Gypsies, and Jews in the British nineteenth century, this dissertation investigates the "timeless" fantasies of artistic freedom, liberation, and tolerance associated with landless "dark Others" that contrast with their historical marginalization in England. What appeal to Barrett Browning and Eliot, are not escape from racial inheritance, but the pressing duties of the lost child to preserve history and identity, as she negotiates a role of political leadership that constrains her private choices. Inspired by the struggle of her adopted country to overthrow Austrian rule, Elizabeth Barrett Browning envisioned a national future of Italy in Casa Guidi Windows. Following the fictionalized travel writing of Anna Jameson and Arthur Hugh Clough that attempts to avoid politics in favor of art, I argue that by constructing kinship through Anglo-Italian literary tradition, Barrett Browning advocates the Italian revolutions of 1848 as liberal politics demanding English sympathy through spiritual inheritance. Conversely, Gypsies shed their ?spiritual appeal? to become racial figures, through the rise of Gypsy ethnography, popularized by George Borrow and later the Gyspy Lore Society, who mapped the linguistic and racial origins of the English Romany. The claim to race and history provides no solution for survival in Eliot?s long poem The Spanish Gypsy. Although Fedalma?s interstitial role does not bridge Gypsy and Spain, in Eliot?s last novel Daniel Deronda, the adopted child's claim to racial memory depends on the disinherited daughter. Deronda's origins are legitimized through his reunion with his mother, but the process of inheriting Judaism rests on the tradition of Jewish women writers such as Grace Aguilar, who argued for women's religious education. The "exotic Jewess" Mirah resists conversion and reconstructs racial identity through the memory of her mother's spiritual instruction