1 The Impact of Attribute Preferences on Adoption Timing: The Case of Photo-Voltaic (PV) Solar Cells for Household Electricity Generation Towhidul Islam a and Nigel Meade b a Department of Marketing and Consumer Studies University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada b Imperial College Business School, London SW7 2AZ, UK Abstract We are concerned with micro-generation, individual households generating electricity using a renewable energy technology. We focus on modelling the adoption probability of photo- voltaic solar panels by a household. Using data collected from an area of Canada where a generous feed-in tariff is available to households generating electricity from solar panels, we measure household level preferences for panels and use these preferences along with household characteristics to predict adoption time intentions. We use recent developments in measuring household level preferences for innovations via discrete choice experiments and establish a causal link between the attributes of the technology and adoption time intentions using discrete time survival mixture analysis. Significant preferences included lower cost, greater energy savings and lower fossil fuel inflation. Estimation of hazard probabilities showed that the significant preferences had intuitively reasonable effects. The hazard probabilities allow us to compute cumulative probability of adoption over a ten year period per household. Technology awareness has a significant effect on the adoption probability, reinforcing the need for effective education. Our approach indicates the level of heterogeneity in preferences, particularly high for investment criteria and CO 2 emissions. These findings suggest that education campaigns should explain more about investment criteria, feed-in tariffs and environmental effects. Keywords: Attribute preferences, Discrete Choice Experiments, Discrete-time survival mixture analysis