From simple to complex: A revealed preference test of discrete choice experiment designs

Christian Vossler and Ewa Zawojska ()
Additional contact information
Ewa Zawojska: Faculty of Economic Sciences University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland, https://coin.wne.uw.edu.pl/ezawojska/

No 2025-03, Working Papers from University of Tennessee, Department of Economics

Abstract: Researchers employing discrete choice experiments to value publicly provided goods face several experimental design decisions. Fundamental amongst them are whether to ask participants one or many choice questions to elicit valuations, and how many choice options to include in each. To provide guidance for researchers tackling these decisions, and policy makers charged with interpreting welfare estimates based on these decisions, we conducted a financially incentivized online field experiment to provide a ground truth comparison of three leading elicitation approaches. A single binary choice question and a sequence of binary choice questions yield equal willingness-to-pay estimates. A sequence of trinary choices results in lower demand estimates. The latter approach, while dominant in the stated preference literature, encourages serial status quo choices due to increased task complexity, and is prone to framing effects in that the value for one good depends on the other good included in the choice set. These behavioral effects more than offset the theoretical efficiency advantage of this elicitation approach.

Keywords: convergent validity; discrete choice experiment; mechanism design; field experiment; stated preferences; voting; elicitation effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C9 D61 D82 H4 Q51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2025-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://web.utk.edu/~jhollad3/RePEc/2025-03.pdf First version, 2025 (application/pdf)

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:ten:wpaper:2025-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Tennessee, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Scott Holladay ().