Giving Stated Preference Respondents "Time to Think": Results From Four Countries
Abstract
Previous studies have found that contingent valuation (CV) respondents who are given
overnight to reflect on a CV scenario have 30-40% lower average willingness-to-pay
(WTP) than respondents who are interviewed in a single session. This "time to think"
(TTT) effect could explain much of the gap between real and hypothetical WTP observed
in experimental studies. Yet giving time to think is still rare in binary or multinomial
discrete choice studies. We review the literature on increasing survey respondents'
opportunities to reflect on their answers and synthesize results from parallel TTT
studies on private vaccine demand in four countries. Across all four countries, we
find robust and consistent evidence from both raw data and multivariate models for
a TTT effect: giving respondents overnight to think reduced the probability that a
respondent said he or she would buy the hypothetical vaccines. Average WTP fell approximately
40%. Respondents with time to think were also more certain of their answers, and a
majority said they used the opportunity to consult with their spouse or family. We
conclude with a discussion of why researchers might be hesitant to adopt the TTT methodology.
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
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Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/5985Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1007/s10640-011-9508-4Publication Info
Cook, J; Jeuland, M; Maskery, B; & Whittington, D (2012). Giving Stated Preference Respondents "Time to Think": Results From Four Countries.
Environmental and Resource Economics, 51(4). pp. 473-496. 10.1007/s10640-011-9508-4. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/5985.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Marc A. Jeuland
Associate Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy
Marc Jeuland is an Associate Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, with
a joint appointment in the Duke Global Health Institute. His research interests include
nonmarket valuation, water and sanitation, environmental health, energy poverty and
transitions, trans-boundary water resource planning and management, and the impacts
and economics of climate change. Jeuland's recent research includes work to understand
the economic implications of climate change for water

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