The Effects of Emotions on Stated Preferences for Environmental Change: a re-examination

Yilong Xu, Mikolaj Czajkowski, Nick Hanley, Leonhard Lades, Charles Noussair and Steven Tucker

No 2024-05, Experimental Economics Center Working Paper Series from Experimental Economics Center, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University

Abstract: We consider how people's emotions affect their stated preferences and willingness to pay for changes in environmental quality, focusing on the effect of incidental emotions. We use videos to induce emotional states and test the replicability of the results reported in Hanley et al. (2016). Additionally, we employ a novel methodology - Face reading software - to verify whether the intended emotional states were successfully induced. We find that our treatments succeed in implementing the predicted emotional condition in terms of self-reported emotions, but had a variable effect on measured (estimated) emotional states. We replicate the result from Hanley et al. (2016): induced emotional state has no significant effect on stated preference estimates or on willingness to pay for an environmental quality change. Moreover, we confirm that, irrespective of the treatment assignment or emotional state - be it self-reported or measured - we observe no significant effect of emotion on preference estimates. We conclude that stated preference estimates for environmental change are unaffected by changes in incidental emotions. Our results suggest that preference estimates are robust to the emotional state of the responder.

Keywords: Choice experiments; Laboratory Experiments; Behavioral Economics; Environmental Valuation; Emotions; Cost-Benefit Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 Q51 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20
Date: 2024-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://excen.gsu.edu/workingpapers/GSU_EXCEN_WP_2024-05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The effects of emotions on stated preferences for environmental change: A re-examination (2025)
Working Paper: The Effects of Emotions on Stated Preferences for Environmental Change: a re-examination (2024)
Working Paper: The Effects of Emotions on Stated Preferences for Environmental Change: a re-examination (2024)
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:exc:wpaper:2024-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Experimental Economics Center Working Paper Series from Experimental Economics Center, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by J. Todd Swarthout ().