Legon pushes for data-driven policies and consumer goods

Head of the Legon Preference Analytics Group and statistics lecturer at the University of Ghana, Dr. Isaac Baidoo, has urged policymakers and service providers to design products based on consumer preference in order to gain the needed public response.

This, he said, can be achieved through the adoption of a tool that economists refer to as the discrete choice experimentation to inform the designing of consumer-tailored socio-economic interventions and services.

Speaking to the B&FT on the sidelines of a data management and statistics workshop in Accra, he said adoption of the tool will enable service providers to formulate data-driven and experimental policies.

“There is currently a lack in the market of service providers and policy-makers who are employing microeconomic experiments to inform the designing of products and services that consumers actually want, and this is where discrete choice experimentation/analysis becomes a good tool.

“This tool provides deep insights into consumer behaviour, and it is therefore a versatile option which when embraced will enable policymakers and service providers to design consumer-tailored products that will gain the desired public response.

“This tool is a step in that direction to ensure policymakers and service providers consider more theoretical and data-driven approaches when coming out with consumer goods and services, as well as other socio-economic interventions,” he said.

Dr. Baidoo said, on the broader scale, government’s socio-economic interventions will generate the maximum coverage while institutions and service providers can design products that will be responsive to the demands of consumers.

“Discrete choice experimentation is an effective method to increase the public uptake of goods and services in the various sectors of the economy.

“With this tool, marketers can improve their products and services to exhibit those features that consumers find more valuable; and that’s when we can have the situation where a product can be designed with all the features consumers want at the right price.”

The one-day workshop on the theme “Tools for microeconomic experimentation: Discrete Choice Analysis: A Case Study”, was organised by the statistics and data management thematic area of the Economy of Ghana Network (EGN) -- a country-level knowledge network of statisticians and economists from the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER).

Dr. Baidoo said the tool is a marketable skill that service providers must employ given the country’s expanding microeconomic demands, and that the EGN will collaborate with other departments and businesses to push the agenda.

“When it comes to addressing economic issues, we are also members of the economy and we have intuition as to what we believe is true and what preferences consumers exhibit as attributes of goods and services change.

“So we believe this tool will enable us to quantify those relationships and put them on a firm empirical basis; otherwise shifting from intuition-based policies to data-driven and experimental policies and so it will be for the provision of goods and services. This is where EGN becomes a vital link.

“This tool will allow consumers to discriminate between choices and identify those choices that are valuable to them and those which have no effect, before taking a decision,” he said.