Understanding Seat Choices the Trade-Off Between Locational and Personal Space Preferences

Consumers are often faced with choices that require them to tradeoff their locational preference with the need to maintain sufficient personal space (e.g., movie theaters, airplanes, classrooms). After we define attributes for locational choices and the need for personal spaces, we introduce a Bayesian methodology that allows for the identification of the heterogeneous drivers of choices faced by consumers in crowded environments. We illustrate the usefulness of the methodology an experiment of movie theater seating.