Modelling heterogeneity in patients' preferences for the attributes of a general practitioner appointment

This paper examines the distribution of preferences in a sample of patients who responded to a discrete choice experiment on the choice of general practitioner appointments. In addition to standard logit, mixed and latent class logit models are used to analyse the data from the choice experiment. It is found that there is significant preference heterogeneity for all the attributes in the experiment and that both the mixed and latent class models lead to significant improvements in fit compared to the standard logit model. Moreover, the distribution of preferences implied by the preferred mixed and latent class models is similar for many attributes.