@article{84158bd5a2cf48588a5df2b47135546d,
title = "Reducing bias in preference elicitation for environmental public goods*",
abstract = "The recent stated preference literature emphasises the importance of incentive compatible elicitation methods, which depend on respondent beliefs that payment can be collected if provision occurs. We investigate this condition in a randomised field experiment where stated choices are incentivised financially. The objective of the treatment was to make choices salient by making each decision financially relevant and to increase the respondents' beliefs that future payments will be enforced. Our results show that the treatment increases estimates of the marginal utility of income, with the effect being economically and statistically significant for low-income respondents. We develop a stylised theoretical framework that allows us to quantify the bias that is implied by the observed differences between the treated and control groups. We find that failure to account for respondents' doubts about payment coercion in an otherwise well-designed survey inflates the marginal willingness to pay among low-income respondents by a factor of at least 1.72.",
author = "Brent, {Daniel A.} and Lata Gangadharan and Leroux, {Anke D.} and Raschky, {Paul A.}",
note = "Funding Information: The authors are grateful for helpful comments from Jeff Bennett, Mike Burton, Thijs Dekker, Denzil Fiebig, Glenn Harrison, Robert Johnston, Andrea Leiter‐Scheiring, John List, Jim Murphy, Christian Vossler and participants at AARES 2016, WCERE 2014 and the Behavioral and Experimental Workshop at Monash University, 2 anonymous referees, the associate editor and the editor that greatly improved the paper. Funding from the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities (CRC grant number 20110044) and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hatch/Multi‐State Appropriations under Project #PEN04631 and Accession #1014400 is acknowledged. This project has been approved by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee; MUHREC#: CF12/2511 2912001358. † Funding Information: The authors are grateful for helpful comments from Jeff Bennett, Mike Burton, Thijs Dekker, Denzil Fiebig, Glenn Harrison, Robert Johnston, Andrea Leiter-Scheiring, John List, Jim Murphy, Christian Vossler and participants at AARES 2016, WCERE 2014 and the Behavioral and Experimental Workshop at Monash University, 2 anonymous referees, the associate editor and the editor that greatly improved the paper. Funding from the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities (CRC grant number 20110044) and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hatch/Multi-State Appropriations under Project #PEN04631 and Accession #1014400 is acknowledged. This project has been approved by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee; MUHREC#: CF12/2511 2912001358. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc.",
year = "2022",
month = apr,
doi = "10.1111/1467-8489.12463",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "66",
pages = "280--308",
journal = "Australian Journal of Agricultural Economics",
issn = "0004-9395",
publisher = "Wiley-Blackwell",
number = "2",
}