Impact of consequentiality in willingness to accept: evidence from a choice experiment with land managers

Studies analysing land managers’ stated preferences for participation in environmental policy initiatives have largely overlooked the issue of hypothetical bias (HB). In this study, a discrete choice experiment focusing on farmers’ willingness to accept (WTA) to participate in agri-environmental schemes is used to examine an HB mitigation measure. The ex post HB mitigation measure is based on perceived consequentiality, grounded in the notion that greater survey consequentiality implies greater survey credibility, prompting land managers to provide more realistic responses. The results show that such a measure can help to reduce HB, which can lead to WTA being overestimated by 35%, in line with recent meta-analyses focusing on WTA settings for private goods. The results also indicate that perceived consequentiality exhibits a kind of “knife-edge” effect, like that reported for WTP settings with public goods. Overall, the results support the value of accounting for and enhancing perceived consequentiality. While this study opens up different avenues for further research, it should help future valuations of this kind to provide more accurate estimates, enabling more precise policy-making support for land and resource managers.