Many decision problems are faced not once but repeatedly. For instance, the choice of a residential location, the selection of a travel mode for a trip to work, or the purchase of consumer brands within a product-class are recurrent choice situations. It is therefore not surprising that much of the work on understanding choice behavior changed its emphasis from the analysis of single to the investigation of intertemporal choices. However, despite the importance and promise of this research and the availability of numerous data sets in microeconomics, sociology, geography, and epidemiology, many issues encountered in the analysis of choice data over time await satisfactory solutions. The major focus of the proposed research is to extend the applicability of latent structure choice models to the analysis of different types of longitudinal choice data. These extensions address taste changes over time, dependencies between choices, non-stationarities in the decision-environment (including changing choice sets), and interactions among these factors. The availability of flexible, easy to interpret and parsimonious longitudinal choice models will lead to important insights about decision-making over time, and they will be instrumental for the development and testing of economic, psychological, and sociological theories about the dynamics of choice behavior.
