Are preferences stated in web vs. personal interviews different? A comparison of willingness to pay results for a large multi-country study of the Baltic Sea eutrophication reduction

Ewa Zawojska and Mikolaj Czajkowski

No 258604, Annual Meeting, 2017, June 18-21, Montreal, Canada from Canadian Agricultural Economics Society

Abstract: We investigate the prevailing view in the stated preference literature that the data collection mode does not significantly affect the value estimates. Based on data from Computer-Assisted Web Interviews and Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews aimed at assessing the social benefits for Poland from meeting the nutrient load reduction targets defined in the HELCOM’s Baltic Sea Action Plan (2007), we find that the value estimates obtained from the two modes differ significantly. This evidences the existence of a “pure” mode effect as we control for socio-demographic differences between the web-interviewed and personally-interviewed samples by weighting the observations. The relative difference in the derived values between the two modes is used to update the estimates of the economic values of reducing nutrient loadings to the Baltic Sea provided by Ahtiainen et al. (2014) for every Baltic Sea country. In addition to controlling for the mode effect (as different, web and personal, modes were used in different countries), we examine 18 alternative model specifications to find the distribution that captures best the payment-card willingness-to-pay responses. Overall, our study illustrates the extent of the impact that the choice of a data collection mode can have on valuation results.

Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Institutional and Behavioral Economics; Research Methods/Statistical Methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16
Date: 2017-06-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm and nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:caes17:258604

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.258604

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