Examining the Role of Social Isolation on Stated Preferences

Abstract

Benefit-cost analysis remains the central paradigm used throughout the public sector. A necessary condition underlying efficient benefitcost analysis is an accurate estimate of the total value of the nonmarketed good or service in question. While economists have long measured the benefits of private goods routinely bought and sold in the marketplace, a much more difficult task faces the practitioner interested in estimating the total benefits of increased air and water quality, for example. In such cases, policy makers rely on stated preference methods (contingent markets) to provide signals of value. Recently there has been a lively debate about whether, and to what extent, "hypothetical bias" permeates benefit estimation in contingent markets.' This debate has proliferated among academics and practitioners over the past several decades, and continues to find its way into public disputes of damage assessment, development decisions, and discussions of optimal regulatory standards. This study extends the debate in a new direction by taking advantage of a unique opportunity we were provided at the University of Central Florida (UCF), where we were ap

Motives for sharing in social networks

“…For example, List et al (2004), Leider et al (2009), andDellaVigna et al (2011) try to measure the 'why' of sharing, and find that social pressure and incentive-based motives are important. Barr and Genicot (2008) and Attanasio et al (2009) try to understand the 'who' of sharing.…”

Big experimenter is watching you! Anonymity and prosocial behavior in the laboratory

“…While this ensured that members of the same group were spatially separated in the double-anonymous treatment, the additional distance itself also constitutes a difference that might have affected behavior. List et al (2004) examine whether the elicitation method affects responses in a contingent valuation exercise. 8 Respondents in the study are asked to vote "Yes" or "No" on contributing $20 to provide start-up capital for a new Center for Environmental Policy Analysis at the University of Central Florida.…”

“…In addition, there are two recent papers that investigate selection effects and fail to find confirming evidence for the hypothesis that students with stronger prosocial inclinations are more likely to self-select into experiments (Cleave et al, 2010;Falk et al, 2010). The effect of variations in scrutiny on other-regarding behavior has also been empirically investigated in several papers before (see, in particular, Hoffman et al, 1994;Bolton and Zwick, 1995;Laury et al, 1995;Hoffman et al, 1996;Bolton et al, 1998;List et al, 2004;Cox and Deck, 2005). However, as we will discuss in much more detail in section 2 the existing studies not only provide mixed results, but differences in experimental procedures and games within and across studies make it difficult to get a coherent overall picture of the results.…”

“…When we designed our experiments, our aim was to develop experimental procedures that satisfy the following three principles: i) Ceteris-paribus variation of experimenter-subject anonymity Previous studies often compare single-anonymous and double-anonymous treatments that do not only differ with respect to the presence of experimenter-subject anonymity, but also exhibit significant differences in decision making procedures (see, e.g., Hoffman et al, 1994;Bolton and Zwick, 1995;Laury et al, 1995;Bolton et al, 1998;List et al, 2004). 2 This raises the problem that the additional differences in decision making procedures may lead to an underestimation or overestimation of the anonymity effect.…”

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—A multiple country test of an oath script

“…2 1 The term hypothetical bias is somewhat misleading because it suggests that one single real value exists with which we can compare the value obtained from a hypothetical situation. However, studies have shown that experimental situations involving real payoffs can also lead to biased estimates (e.g., Alpízar et al 2008;List et al 2004). 2 There are other suggestions for how to reduce hypothetical bias, for example, ex-post calibration of the WTP responses with follow-up questions on certainty (e.g., Champ et al 1997;Champ and Bishop 2001) and time-tothink protocols (Cook et al 2007;Whittington et al 1992).…”