Estimating Family Preference for Home Elderly-care Services: Large-scale Conjoint Survey Experiment in Japan

Elderly care services have attracted attention in many aging countries. However, the relative importance of service attributes has not been well evaluated. This paper estimates the consumer surplus of multi-attribute elderly care services at home, which allows us to evaluate them from the social welfare perspective. We propose a new empirical approach combining a fully-randomized conjoint survey experiment and the non-parametric rational choice model. Our survey is for Japanese respondents aged 40-59 and shows that expansions of service contents significantly increases the consumer surplus. Additionally, the surplus gain is completely heterogeneous; while many respondents have no surplus gains, the average surpluses are of significant size among remaining respondents.