Did You Miss Something? Inattentive Respondents in Discrete Choice Experiments

Stated preference practitioners are increasingly relying on internet panels to gather data, but emerging evidence suggests potential limitations with respect to respondent and response quality in such panels. We identify groups of inattentive respondents who have failed to watch information videos provided in the survey to completion. Our results show that inattentive respondents have a higher cost sensitivity, are more likely to have a small scale parameter, and are more likely to ignore the non-cost attributes. These results are largely driven by respondents failing to watch the information video about the discrete choice experiment, attributes and levels, which underlines the importance of information provision and highlights possible implications of inattentiveness. We develop a modeling framework to simultaneously address preference, scale and attribute processing heterogeneity. We find that when we consider attribute non-attendance—scale differences disappear, which suggests that the type of heterogeneity detected in a model could be the result of un-modeled heterogeneity of a different kind. We discuss implications of our results

The use of latent variable models in policy: A road fraught with peril?

This paper explores the potential usefulness and possible pitfalls of using integrated choice and latent variable models (hybrid choice models) on stated choice data to inform policy. Using a series of Monte-Carlo simulations, we consider how model selection depends on the strength of relationship between the latent variable and preferences and the strength of relationship between the latent variable and the indicator. Our findings show that integrated choice and latent variable models are difficult to estimate, even when the data generating process is known. Ultimately, we show that their use should be driven by the analyst’s belief about the strength of correlations between preferences, the latent variable and indicator. We discuss the implications of our results for policy

Accommodating satisficing behaviour in stated choice experiments

Accumulating evidence suggests that respondents in stated choice experiments use simplifying strategies. Such behavior is a deviation from random utility theory and can lead to wrong inferences regarding preferences. This is a first attempt to systematically explore satisficing in stated choice experiments. We consider 944 satisficing rules and allow respondents to revise the rules adopted throughout the choice sequence. Only a minority of respondents used the same satisficing rule across the entire sequence. Allowing for updating reveals that the use of the heuristic changes over the choice sequence. Considering satisficing behavior leads to improved model fits and different marginal willingness-to-pay estimates

Disentangling the influence of knowledge on attribute non-attendance

The data from the cold-water coral survey was collected as part of the project “Habitat-Fisheries interactions – Valuation and Bio-Economic Modeling of Cold-Water Coral”, funded by the Research Council of Norway (Grant no. 216485). We also thank the Marine Alliance Science and Technology (MASTS, www.masts.ac.uk, Scot­tish Fund­ing Coun­cil, Grant no. HR09011) for part funding this research.We seek to disentangle the effect of knowledge about an environmental good on respondents' propensity to ignore one or more attributes on the choice cards in a discrete choice experiment eliciting people's preferences for increased protection of cold-water corals in Norway. We hypothesize that a respondent's level of knowledge influences the degree to which she ignores attributes. Respondents participated in a quiz on cold-water coral prior to the valuation task and we use the result of the quiz as an ex-ante measure of their knowledge. Our results suggests that a high level of knowledge, measured by a high quiz score, is associated with higher probabilities of attendance to the three non-cost attributes, although this effect is only significant for one of them. A higher quiz score is also associated with a significantly lower probability of attending to the cost attribute. Furthermore, although being told your score has mixed directional effects on attribute non-attendance, it does not significantly affect the probability of attending to any of the attributes. Finally, allowing for attribute non-attendance leads to substantially lower conditional willingness-to-pay estimates. This highlights the importance of measuring how much people know about the goods over which they are choosing, and underlines that more research is needed to understand how information influences the degree to which respondents ignore attributes.PostprintPeer reviewe

Ponderous, Proficient or Professional? Survey Experience and Smartphone Effects in Stated Preference Research

New parenthood causes large decreases in labor market incomes for mothers but not fathers, a stylized fact known as the “child penalty.” We combine a simple household model with estimates of child penalties in heterosexual nonadopting, adopting, and same-sex couples to better understand what causes the child penalty in heterosexual nonadopting couples. Our results largely rule out giving birth and the father’s advantage in the labor market as mechanisms, leaving preferences, gender norms, and discrimination as the main explanations. In addition, our paper provides novel evidence on the impact of children on labor market outcomes of adopting and same-sex couples.publishedVersio

Potential for Sustainable Aquaculture: Insights from Discrete Choice Experiments

The growth in global aquaculture production may address the lack of sustainability in wild fisheries, alleviate poverty in rural and coastal areas, and help meet the worldwide increase in demand for animal protein. However, there is an ongoing debate about the severity of the environmental impact of aquaculture production. Investing in new high-tech production systems can address both productivity growth and the environmental externalities, but high investment costs hinder adoption of high-tech production methods. We investigate the potential of a payment for environmental services program easing access to capital for producers to increase willingness-to-invest in more sustainable aquaculture practices in Vietnam. We conducted two discrete choice experiments to explore the supply and demand side of the policy. First, we elicited the public’s willingness-to-pay to reduce the environmental impact of conventional shrimp aquaculture, and second, we elicited farmers willingness-to-accept a credit subsidy to invest in high-tech production methods. Our results show that the public care about reduced environmental impacts, while farmers strongly prefer increased productivity. Furthermore, the public’s willingness-to-pay for reduced environmental impacts exceeds producer’s willingness-to-accept a subsidy to invest under most scenarios. This implies a potential for more sustainable aquaculture production in Vietnam

A simple satisficing model

Economic theory is built on the assumption that people are omniscient utility maximizers. In reality, this is unlikely to be true and often people lack information about all alternatives that are available to them; either because the information is unavailable or that the cost of searching for and evaluating that information is high. In this paper, we develop a simple and tractable model that captures satisficing behavior. We show that the model can retrieve consistent parameters under a large range of experimental conditions. We test our model on synthetic data and present an empirical application. We discuss the implications of our results for the use of satisficing choice models in explaining choice

Diabolical dilemmas of COVID-19: An empirical study into Dutch society's trade-offs between health impacts and other effects of the lockdown

We report and interpret preferences of a sample of the Dutch adult population for different strategies to end the so-called ‘intelligent lockdown’ which their government had put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a discrete choice experiment, we invited participants to make a series of choices between policy scenarios aimed at relaxing the lockdown, which were specified not in terms of their nature (e.g. whether or not to allow schools to re-open) but in terms of their effects along seven dimensions. These included health-related effects, but also impacts on the economy, education, and personal income. From the observed choices, we were able to infer the implicit trade-offs made by the Dutch between these policy effects. For example, we find that the average citizen, in order to avoid one fatality directly or indirectly related to COVID-19, is willing to accept a lasting lag in the educational performance of 18 children, or a lasting (>3 years) and substantial (>15%) reduction in net income of 77 households. We explore heterogeneity across individuals in terms of these trade-offs by means of latent class analysis. Our results suggest that most citizens are willing to trade-off health-related and other effects of the lockdown, implying a consequentialist ethical perspective. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that the elderly, known to be at relatively high risk of being affected by the virus, are relatively reluctant to sacrifice economic pain and educational disadvantages for the younger generation, to avoid fatalities. We also identify a so-called taboo trade-off aversion amongst a substantial share of our sample, being an aversion to accept morally problematic policies that simultaneously imply higher fatality numbers and lower taxes. We explain various ways in which our results can be of value to policy makers in the context of the COVID-19 and future pandemics

Civil War Impacts on Youth Business Groups in Tigray: A Pre-Analysis Plan and Documentation for Ethical Approval by Institutional Review Board at NMBU

This is a revised plan for the finalization of the “Youth Groups for Sustainable Development: Lessons from the Ethiopian Model” (Researcher project under NORGLOBAL2, funded by the Research Council of Norway). The project started in 2019 and was planned to last for four years. A civil war broke out in the study areas in November 2020 and made it impossible to continue the project according to the initial plan. A lot of survey and experimental data had already been collected by this time and the project was in the process of implementing a number of Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) on business group training, leadership, and women’s empowerment. These RCTs were planned implemented and analyzed in collaboration with a number of international partners. We were unfortunately unable to do this. The civil war lasted for two years and a substantial share of the project funds were locked into local banks and the local collaborating university (Mekelle University) that were closed down during the civil war. We asked for an extension of the project to the end of 2023 and was granted this by the Research Council of Norway – to enable us to do a final assessment what has happened to the youth groups, their members, and families during the civil war and to assess the youth (business) groups’ role in the recreation of the members’ livelihoods after the civil war. We were informed on June 15th, 2023, that the project funds that have been locked in the bank in Mekelle since the civil war started can be accessed through Mekelle University for the continuation of the project fieldwork. We submitted this plan and application for ethical approval at NMBU on June 16th, 2023. Approval was received on August 3rd, 2023. Some minor revisions were implemented based on the review and further preparation of baseline data from 2019. Training of the field team and programming of final survey instruments with translation into the local language Tigrinya started immediately. The training and pilot testing of the instruments were completed by August 19th, 2023. The actual fieldwork started on August 22nd after some final editing of the experiments. This report thus presents the final instruments

Willingness to pay to protect cold water corals

There is increasing pressure to use currently untapped resources in the deep sea, raising questions regarding ecosystem service trade‐offs in these often unknown areas. We assessed the trade‐offs between protection of cold‐water coral reefs and economic activities, such as fisheries and petroleum extraction, through a survey of a representative sample of the populations of Norway and Ireland. Choice‐experiment surveys were conducted in workshop settings and through the internet. Both survey approaches provided some similar results, such as preferences for protection. Our cross‐country comparison showed the general public in Norway and Ireland was willing, despite possible conflict with extractive and consumptive economic activities in the deep sea, to protect cold‐water corals as habitat for fish. On average, people were willing to pay NKr 341 and NKr 424 for a small and large increase in protected areas respectively, and NKr 880 if the area is important habitat for fish, all else held equal. However, there was large variation across individuals and countries. Norwegian respondents valued pure existence of cold‐water corals more than the Irish respondents, and the latter were less willing to trade off industrial activities than the former. Nonetheless, the findings support conservation of cold‐water corals and more generally of ocean environments that provide habitat for fish, which the current deep sea governance systems are not adequately designed or sufficiently well‐structured to secure