Dealing with Ignored Attributes in Choice Experiments on Valuation of Sweden’s Environmental Quality Objectives

Abstract

Using a choice experiment, this paper investigates how Swedish citizens value three environmental quality objectives. In addition, a follow-up question is used to investigate whether respondents ignored any attributes when responding. The resulting information is used in the model estimation by restricting the individual parameters for the ignored attributes to zero. When taking the shares of respondents who considered both the environmental and the cost attributes (52-69 percent of the respondents) into account, then the WTPs for each attribute change if the respondents who ignored the attributes have a zero WTP. At the same time, we find evidence that not all respondents who claimed to have ignored an attribute really did. Instead, our results show that they put less weight on the attributes they claimed to have ignored. We also find that people with a university education were more likely to consider all the attributes than others did.

The Influence of Genotype Information on Psychiatrists’ Treatment Recommendations: More Experienced Clinicians Know Better What to Ignore

“…Building on encouraging results from past research on ANA in environmental economics [21,45,46] and health [47][14], our study confirms that ANA is a valuable tool for analyzing clinical decision making. To the authors' knowledge, this study is the first to suggest that less experienced psychiatrists may be inappropriately influenced by a patient's genetic information in their clinical decision making.…”

Behavioral implications of providing real incentives in stated choice experiments

“…However, as opposed to our hypothesis 6 stated above, it has been argued in the literature, that when merely asked to state non-attendance there is no incentive to provide a truthful answer, regardless of the setting being hypothetical or real (e.g. Hess and Hensher, 2010;Alemu et al, 2013;Carlsson et al, 2010). Instead it is suggested to rely on non-attendance being inferred from the model.…”

“…Or perhaps even more interesting; do the estimates represent preferences? Hess et al (2012), Alemu et al (2013) and Carlsson et al (2010) suggest that rather than ignoring attributes completely, respondents might simply put less weight on attributes they claim to have ignored. They base this on the fact that the most often ignored non-monetary attribute also receives the lowest preference ranking in their estimated utility model.…”

The Design of Policy Instruments towards Sustainable Livestock Production in China: An Application of the Choice Experiment Method

“…Most of the previous studies showed that the CE results will be biased if the analyst did not deal with the attribute non-attendance problem, however, not all studies hold the same view [40,41]. A stated non-attendance(SNA) method (Hensher et al [42], Carlsson et al [43] and Chalak et al [44]) or an inferred non-attendance (INA) method (Hess et al [45] and Hensher et al [46]) can be used to identify attribute non-attendance.…”