Should reference alternatives in pivot design SC surveys be treated differently?

Analysts are increasingly making use of pivot style Stated Choice (SC) data in the estimation of choice models. These datasets often contain a reference alternative whose attributes remain invariant across replications for the same respondent. This paper presents evidence to suggest that respondents react differently to the attributes of these reference alternatives and those of purely hypothetical alternatives. While some such evidence exists in the existing literature, this paper goes further and details a number of different departures from a common treatment of the two types of alternatives, relating both to the observed part of utility and the error term.