Attending to the Reasons for Attribute Non-attendance in Choice Experiments
Mohammed Alemu (),
Morten Mørkbak,
Søren Olsen and
Carsten Jensen ()
Environmental & Resource Economics, 2013, vol. 54, issue 3, 333-359
Abstract:
This paper focuses on behavioural reasons underlying stated attribute non-attendance in choice experiments. In order to identify and incorporate procedures for dealing with heterogeneous attribute processing strategies, we ask respondents follow-up questions regarding their reasons for ignoring attributes. Based on these statements, we conclude that the standard way of assigning a zero impact of ignored attributes on the likelihood is inappropriate. We find that some respondents act in accordance with the passive bounded rationality assumption since they ignore an attribute simply because it does not affect their utility. Excluding these genuine zero preferences, as the standard approach essentially does, might bias results. Other respondents claim to have ignored attributes to simplify choices. However, we find that these respondents have actually not completely ignored attributes. We argue along the rationally adaptive behavioural model that valid preference information may indeed be elicited in these cases, and we illustrate how recoding of non-attendance statements conditional on stated reasons may be a more appropriate solution than the current standard way of taking stated non-attendance into account. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013
Keywords: Attribute non-attendance; Choice experiment; Error component logit model; Passive bounded rationality; Rationally adaptive behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (63)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10640-012-9597-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
Working Paper: Attending to the reasons for attribute non-attendance in Choice Experiments (2011) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:enreec:v:54:y:2013:i:3:p:333-359
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/s10640-012-9597-8
Access Statistics for this article
Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman
More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().