Aiding recall in self-reported recreation participation: Empirical evidence from seaside trips

Travel cost data used in recreation demand analysis are assumed to reflect actual behavior. However, these data are typically collected through surveys, which raises concerns about the accuracy of respondents’ self-reports. Recall issues and associated biases, such as rounding bias and telescoping error, are well documented in empirical research and affect estimates of the benefits of recreation. We study whether trip recall can be improved through dedicated survey tools. We implement split-sample treatments to examine how response formats for trip-number elicitation and recall aids influence reported trip behavior and associated welfare estimates. The survey of more than 3000 Polish residents asked about their past trips to the Baltic seaside. Our findings indicate that a drop-down response format lowers the frequency of round numbers of trips compared to a commonly used text-box response format, arguably increasing the precision of the number. We also observe that providing a timeline graph illustrating the recall period may increase the number of zero-trip responses and decrease the overall reported number of trips, which suggests a possible reduction in telescoping error. We further find these two recall-aiding approaches lead to lower estimated consumer surplus derived from recreation demand models.