Order and Homogeneity of Family Specific Brand-switching Processes

Most empirical work on Markov processes for brand choice has been based on aggregative data. This article explores the validity of the crucial assumption that underlies such analyses, i.e., that all the families in the sample follow a Markov process with the same or similar transition probability matrices. The results show that there is a great deal of diversity among families’ switching processes, and that many of them are of zero rather than first order.