Did You Miss Something? Inattentive Respondents in Discrete Choice Experiments

Erlend Dancke Sandorf

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2019, vol. 73, issue 4, No 11, 1197-1235

Abstract: Abstract Stated preference practitioners are increasingly relying on internet panels to gather data, but emerging evidence suggests potential limitations with respect to respondent and response quality in such panels. We identify groups of inattentive respondents who have failed to watch information videos provided in the survey to completion. Our results show that inattentive respondents have a higher cost sensitivity, are more likely to have a small scale parameter, and are more likely to ignore the non-cost attributes. These results are largely driven by respondents failing to watch the information video about the discrete choice experiment, attributes and levels, which underlines the importance of information provision and highlights possible implications of inattentiveness. We develop a modeling framework to simultaneously address preference, scale and attribute processing heterogeneity. We find that when we consider attribute non-attendance—scale differences disappear, which suggests that the type of heterogeneity detected in a model could be the result of un-modeled heterogeneity of a different kind. We discuss implications of our results.

Keywords: Discrete choice experiments; Probabilistic decision process model; Latent class; Internet panels; Inattentive bias; Attribute non-attendance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 H41 Q51 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10640-018-0296-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:73:y:2019:i:4:d:10.1007_s10640-018-0296-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10640-018-0296-y

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 ().