The Centre for the Study of Choice (CenSoC) is a joint initiative of the School of Marketing in the UTS Faculty of Business and the Department of Mathematical Sciences in the UTS Faculty of Science. Its objective is to invest in research and development that leads to better understanding and prediction of individual and group decisions, including the choice processes of managers, organisations and consumers.

Understanding and predicting decisions matters because decisions made by individual consumers, voters, governments and firms impact not only their immediate areas of interest, but also wider communities. Choices made by individuals and groups drive aggregate movements in stock market indices, supply and demand for goods and services, electoral outcomes, and many more community outcomes.

CenSoC’s primary areas of interest are:

• basic/applied Choice research that leads to better consumer and managerial decisions and choices, and better methods for new product development;

• theory and methods that provide new ways to study, model and improve managerial and consumer decision and choice processes; and

• applications that use existing/new theory and methods to solve significant practical problems.

CenSoC uses tools from econometrics, mathematics, statistics, marketing and psychology to build mathematical models of consumer and firm decision-making behaviour. These can be used to predict how consumers or firms will respond to changes in their environment. Examples include predicting market shares for new products, voter acceptance of proposed policy changes, and likely retention rates for jobs with different characteristics.

Our work for CenSoC focuses on the development of new theoretical constructions for optimal discrete choice experiments and on designing experiments for a range of other academic and commercial groups.

Some areas where we have constructed designs include

For more information on CenSoC's activities, please visit the main CenSoC site.