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Consequences of Participant Inattention with an Application to Carbon Taxes for Meat Products

Trey Malone () and Jayson Lusk

Ecological Economics, 2018, vol. 145, issue C, 218-230

Abstract: Despite widespread use in nonmarket valuation, data quality remains an ongoing challenge for survey methods. One key concern is whether participants attentively respond to survey questions or whether they exert less than full effort. To determine the prevalence and consequences of inattention bias in surveys, we estimate how meat demand varies across people who do and do not miss trap questions. Using a split-sample design with discrete choice experiments for meat products, we explore three different trap questions to determine how many potentially inattentive respondents are identified by each method. We find that individuals who miss trap questions respond differently to the choice experiment than individuals who correctly answer the trap question. Inattention generates vastly different compensating variation estimates of a carbon tax, ranging from 3.56 cents per meal choice for the least attentive to 6.13 cents per meal choice for the most attentive.

Keywords: Trap question; Inattention bias; Discrete choice experiment; Meat demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 Q18 Q51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:145:y:2018:i:c:p:218-230

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.09.010

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