When does real become consequential in non-hypothetical choice experiments?

Daniel Chavez, Marco Palma () and Rodolfo Nayga

No 266327, 2018 Annual Meeting, February 2-6, 2018, Jacksonville, Florida from Southern Agricultural Economics Association

Abstract: The proneness of stated preference choice experiments to hypothetical bias has increased the popularity of incentivized or real discrete choice experiments (RDCE). One challenge that practitioners face when designing RDCE is that some of the product alternatives may not be available for the study. To avoid deception, researchers should truthfully inform respondents that only a certain percentage of the product alternatives is available for the experiment. But would the proportion of available products influence the results of the RDCE? Using an induced value choice experiment, we varied the number of potentially binding alternatives in four treatments: 0%, 33%, 66%, and 100% to assess the effect of availability of product alternatives on choice behavior. We designed the induced value experiment with a profit maximization optimal strategy for agents (i.e., with a unique known profit-maximizing alternative). Our results suggest that incentives matter in that the percentage of optimal choices was lowest in the 0% treatment. Interestingly, however, we did not find statistically significant differences in amount of optimal choices in the 33%, 66%, and 100% treatments, suggesting that one could conduct an incentivized RDCE without the need to have all the product alternatives be made available in the study.

Keywords: Institutional and Behavioral Economics; Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-exp and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/266327/files/ChavezEtAlSAEA2018.pdf (application/pdf)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/266327/files/C ... 8.pdf?subformat=pdfa (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: When Does Real Become Consequential in Non-hypothetical Choice Experiments? (2019)
Working Paper: When does real become consequential in non-hypothetical choice experiments? (2018)
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:ags:saea18:266327

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.266327

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2018 Annual Meeting, February 2-6, 2018, Jacksonville, Florida from Southern Agricultural Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().