Willingness to Pay for Curbside Recycling with Detection and Mitigation of Hypothetical Bias

Aadland, David; Caplan, Arthur J.

doi:10.1111/1467-8276.00136

Cited by 150 publications

(110 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(11 reference statements)

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“…7 Both List (2001), who used the full (Cummings and Taylor 1999) script in a second-price auction for a private good, and Lusk (2003), who used a shorter but largely similar script in a dichotomous choice mail survey valuing a private good, found that cheap talk lowered bids for inexperienced consumers but not for experienced ones. Aadland and Caplan (2003), using a very short script in a phone survey, also found evidence that people differ in their susceptibility to cheap talk. Murphy et al (2005b), using the full script in an experiment eliciting individual donations subject to a provision point, found that cheap talk was quite effective at reducing hypothetical bias at bid levels of $9 and higher but less effective at lower bid levels.…”

mentioning

confidence: 92%

Testing the Effectiveness of Certainty Scales, Cheap Talk, and Dissonance-Minimization in Reducing Hypothetical Bias in Contingent Valuation Studies

Morrison

Brown

2009

Environ Resource Econ

127

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Stated preference methods such as contingent valuation and choice modeling are subject to various biases that may lead to differences between actual and hypothetical willingness to pay. Cheap talk, follow-up certainty scales, and dissonance minimization are three techniques for reducing this hypothetical bias. Cheap talk and certainty scales have received considerable attention in the literature, but dissonance minimization has not previously been experimentally tested. Using a four-way split sample design involving over 600 subjects, results from an actual referendum on provision of a quasi-public good were compared with three similar but contingent referenda employing the three bias-reducing techniques. Hypothetical bias was again present. Certainty scales, when properly calibrated, and dissonance minimization were found to be most effective in reducing the bias.

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mentioning

confidence: 92%

Testing the Effectiveness of Certainty Scales, Cheap Talk, and Dissonance-Minimization in Reducing Hypothetical Bias in Contingent Valuation Studies

Morrison

Brown

2009

Environ Resource Econ

127

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“…The underlying idea of the script is that, by raising the issue in the survey, respondents would not want to be part of such an ill-behaved group and would be less prone to hypothetical bias. The effect of the cheap talk script is varied and, among other factors, its success seems to depend on the characteristics of the good, the length of the script, and the valuation method (see Aadland andCaplan 2003, 2006;Carlsson et al, 2005;Cummings and Taylor, 1999;List, 2001;and Murphy et al, 2005). Given these limitations, it is too optimistic to expect cheap talk to completely mitigate hypothetical bias.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Carlsson

Kataria²,

Krupnick

et al. 2013

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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Hypothetical bias is one of the main issues bedeviling the field of nonmarket valuation. The general criticism is that survey responses reflect how people would like to behave, rather than how they actually behave. In our study of climate change and emissions reductions, we took advantage of the increasing bulk of evidence from psychology and economics that addresses the effects of making promises, in order to investigate the effect of an oath script in a contingent valuation survey. The survey was conducted in Sweden and China, and its results indicate that an oath script has significant effects on respondent behavior in answering willingness-to-pay (WTP) questions, some of which vary by country. In both countries, the share of zero WTP responses and extremely high WTP responses decreases when an oath script is used, which also results in lower variance. In China, the oath script also reduces the average WTP, cutting it by half in certain instances. We also found that the oath script has different impacts on various respondent groups. For example, without the oath script, Communist party members in China are more likely than others to have a positive WTP for emissions reductions, but with the oath script, there is no longer any difference between the groups.

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“…The cheap talk approach (Cummings and Taylor 1999), for example, is a popular calibration technique in which the hypothetical bias problem is described to subjects. Yet, the effectiveness of this approach may be sensitive to key variables such as script length (Poe et al 2002;Aadland and Caplan 2003), subject experience (List 2001;Lusk 2003;Aadland and Caplan 2003) and payment amounts (Brown et al 2003;Murphy et al 2005b). In fact, Aadland and Caplan (2006) find that a neutral cheap talk script can actually exacerbate hypothetical bias.…”

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confidence: 99%

A Comparison of Induced Value and Home-Grown Value Experiments to Test for Hypothetical Bias in Contingent Valuation

Murphy

Stevens

Yadav

2010

Environ Resource Econ

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This study tests the hypothesis that hypothetical bias may not be related to value elicitation; rather it may be a value formation problem. When participants are asked to indicate their willingness to pay for an induced value good, we find no evidence of hypothetical bias for three different commodity types (public good, private good, and publicly provided private good). However, when these same subjects are asked to value homegrown goods with no pre-assigned induced value using the same elicitation mechanism, hypothetical values are roughly double actual payments in all three cases. These results support the hypothesis that the process of forming values in a homegrown setting may be a key contributor to hypothetical bias.

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Willingness to Pay for Curbside Recycling with Detection and Mitigation of Hypothetical Bias

Cited by 150 publications

References 29 publications

Testing the Effectiveness of Certainty Scales, Cheap Talk, and Dissonance-Minimization in Reducing Hypothetical Bias in Contingent Valuation Studies

Testing the Effectiveness of Certainty Scales, Cheap Talk, and Dissonance-Minimization in Reducing Hypothetical Bias in Contingent Valuation Studies

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

A Comparison of Induced Value and Home-Grown Value Experiments to Test for Hypothetical Bias in Contingent Valuation

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