Journal
JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR & ORGANIZATION
Volume 135, Issue -, Pages 251-267Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2017.01.018
Keywords
Choice experiment; Stated preferences; Eye-tracking; Information processing; Choice modelling
Categories
Funding
- Chief Scientist Office (CSO) of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates fund the Health Economics Research Unit (HERU)
- Chief Scientist Office [HERU1] Funding Source: researchfish
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Choice experiments (CE), involving multi-attribute choices, are increasingly used in economics to value non-marketed goods. Such choices require individuals to process large amounts of information, shown to trigger partial information strategies in participants. We develop a new framework in which information processing is treated as a latent (unobservable) process. Testing our approach by combining CE and visual attention (VA) data gathered from eye-tracking, we show that treating information processing as a latent process (LIP) outperforms models assuming full information processing (FIP) or binary information processing (BIP). Our modelling of VA results in a number of key findings. We show that the relationship between VA and individuals' preferences depends on the type of product attribute. More specifically, preferences for easier to process attributes appear to be less influenced by changes in underlying level of VA than harder to process attributes. In turn this impacts on willingness-to-pay estimates, with the LIP model resulting in smaller values than those obtained with the FIP model. Our results have implications for CE designers. More time should be spent getting subjects to understand more complicated attributes of the CE. Our results are likely to extend beyond experimental choices (stated preferences) to actual choices (revealed preferences). (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available