IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/apl/wpaper/08-07.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Value and Outcome Uncertainty as Explanations for the WTA vs WTP Disparity: Theory and Experimental Evidence

Author

Listed:
  • William Neilson
  • Michael McKee
  • Robert P. Berrens

Abstract

This paper contributes to the widespread discussion of the sources of the divergence between WTA and WTP values. The paper reports on theoretical and empirical investigations which show that value and outcome uncertainty offer an explanation for this disparity. Given a set of hypotheses generated by the theory, the paper investigates the disparity using an inducedvalue experimental laboratory setting. The incentive-compatible Becker-DeGroot-Marshak mechanism is employed to elicit the WTP and WTA values. Two conclusions can be drawn from the empirical results. First, the WTA - WTP difference is generally increasing in both value and outcome uncertainty. Second, a re-contracting option reduces the disparity when it arises from value uncertainty. Key Words: Experimental, Uncertainty, WTP-WTA disparity

Suggested Citation

  • William Neilson & Michael McKee & Robert P. Berrens, 2008. "Value and Outcome Uncertainty as Explanations for the WTA vs WTP Disparity: Theory and Experimental Evidence," Working Papers 08-07, Department of Economics, Appalachian State University.
    • Handle: RePEc:apl:wpaper:08-07
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://econ.appstate.edu/RePEc/pdf/wp0807.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jack L. Knetsch & J. A. Sinden, 1984. "Willingness to Pay and Compensation Demanded: Experimental Evidence of an Unexpected Disparity in Measures of Value," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 99(3), pages 507-521.
    2. George Wu & Richard Gonzalez, 1996. "Curvature of the Probability Weighting Function," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 42(12), pages 1676-1690, December.
    3. Drazen Prelec, 1998. "The Probability Weighting Function," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 66(3), pages 497-528, May.
    4. Kahneman, Daniel & Knetsch, Jack L & Thaler, Richard H, 1990. "Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(6), pages 1325-1348, December.
    5. Knetsch, Jack L, 1989. "The Endowment Effect and Evidence of Nonreversible Indifference Curves," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(5), pages 1277-1284, December.
    6. Gwendolyn Morrison, 1997. "Willingness to pay and willingness to accept: some evidence of an endowment effect," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(4), pages 411-417.
    7. Grether, David M & Plott, Charles R, 1979. "Economic Theory of Choice and the Preference Reversal Phenomenon," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 69(4), pages 623-638, September.
    8. Rothschild, Michael & Stiglitz, Joseph E., 1970. "Increasing risk: I. A definition," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 2(3), pages 225-243, September.
    9. Kolstad, Charles D. & Guzman, Rolando M., 1999. "Information and the Divergence between Willingness to Accept and Willingness to Pay," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 38(1), pages 66-80, July.
    10. Charles R. Plott & Kathryn Zeiler, 2005. "The Willingness to Pay–Willingness to Accept Gap, the "Endowment Effect," Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(3), pages 530-545, June.
    11. Willig, Robert D, 1976. "Consumer's Surplus without Apology," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 66(4), pages 589-597, September.
    12. Karni, Edi & Safra, Zvi, 1987. ""Preference Reversal' and the Observability of Preferences by Experimental Methods," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 55(3), pages 675-685, May.
    13. Horowitz, John K., 2006. "The Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism is not necessarily incentive compatible, even for non-random goods," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 93(1), pages 6-11, October.
    14. Kachelmeier, Steven J & Shehata, Mohamed, 1992. "Examining Risk Preferences under High Monetary Incentives: Experimental Evidence from the People's Republic of China," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(5), pages 1120-1141, December.
    15. Wiktor L. Adamowicz & Vinay Bhardwaj & Bruce Macnab, 1993. "Experiments on the Difference between Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Accept," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 69(4), pages 416-427.
    16. Hanemann, W Michael, 1991. "Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Accept: How Much Can They Differ?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(3), pages 635-647, June.
    17. Brown, Thomas C. & Gregory, Robin, 1999. "Why the WTA-WTP disparity matters," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 323-335, March.
    18. Harrison, Glenn W., 1986. "An experimental test for risk aversion," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 7-11.
    19. George A. Akerlof, 1970. "The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 84(3), pages 488-500.
    20. Eisenberger, Roselies & Weber, Martin, 1995. "Willingness-to-Pay and Willingness-to-Accept for Risky and Ambiguous Lotteries," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 10(3), pages 223-233, May.
    21. McKee, Michael, 1989. "Intra-experimental income effects and risk aversion," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 109-115, August.
    22. Unknown, 1986. "Letters," Choices: The Magazine of Food, Farm, and Resource Issues, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 1(4), pages 1-9.
    23. Horowitz, John K. & McConnell, K. E., 2003. "Willingness to accept, willingness to pay and the income effect," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 51(4), pages 537-545, August.
    24. Camerer, Colin F & Ho, Teck-Hua, 1994. "Violations of the Betweenness Axiom and Nonlinearity in Probability," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 8(2), pages 167-196, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Oben K Bayrak & Bengt Kriström, 2016. "Is there a valuation gap? The case of interval valuations," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 36(1), pages 218-236.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. William S. Neilson & Michael McKee & Robert P. Berrens, 2013. "Value and outcome uncertainty as explanations for the WTA vs WTP disparity," Chapters, in: John A. List & Michael K. Price (ed.), Handbook on Experimental Economics and the Environment, chapter 6, pages 171-189, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    2. Sayman, Serdar & Onculer, Ayse, 2005. "Effects of study design characteristics on the WTA-WTP disparity: A meta analytical framework," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 26(2), pages 289-312, April.
    3. John K. Horowitz & Kenneth E. McConnell & James J. Murphy, 2013. "Behavioral foundations of environmental economics and valuation," Chapters, in: John A. List & Michael K. Price (ed.), Handbook on Experimental Economics and the Environment, chapter 4, pages 115-156, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    4. Brown, Thomas C. & Gregory, Robin, 1999. "Why the WTA-WTP disparity matters," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 323-335, March.
    5. Andrea Isoni, 2011. "The willingness-to-accept/willingness-to-pay disparity in repeated markets: loss aversion or ‘bad-deal’ aversion?," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 71(3), pages 409-430, September.
    6. Gong, Cynthia M. & Lizieri, Colin & Bao, Helen X.H., 2019. "“Smarter information, smarter consumers”? Insights into the housing market," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 51-64.
    7. Drayer, Joris & Shapiro, Stephen L., 2011. "An examination into the factors that influence consumers’ perceptions of value," Sport Management Review, Elsevier, vol. 14(4), pages 389-398.
    8. Breffle, William S. & Eiswerth, Mark E. & Muralidharan, Daya & Thornton, Jeffrey, 2015. "Understanding how income influences willingness to pay for joint programs: A more equitable value measure for the less wealthy," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 17-25.
    9. Crockett, Erin & Crockett, Sean, 2019. "Endowments and risky choice," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 159(C), pages 344-354.
    10. Horowitz, John K. & McConnell, Kenneth E., 2002. "A Review of WTA/WTP Studies," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 44(3), pages 426-447, November.
    11. Chetan Dave & Catherine Eckel & Cathleen Johnson & Christian Rojas, 2010. "Eliciting risk preferences: When is simple better?," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 41(3), pages 219-243, December.
    12. Ulrich Schmidt & Stefan Traub, 2009. "An Experimental Investigation of the Disparity Between WTA and WTP for Lotteries," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 66(3), pages 229-262, March.
    13. Andrea Isoni & Graham Loomes & Robert Sugden, 2011. "The Willingness to Pay—Willingness to Accept Gap, the "Endowment Effect," Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations: Comment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(2), pages 991-1011, April.
    14. Simon Gächter & Eric J. Johnson & Andreas Herrmann, 2022. "Individual-level loss aversion in riskless and risky choices," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 92(3), pages 599-624, April.
    15. Banzhaf, H. Spencer, 2016. "Constructing markets: environmental economics and the contingent valuation controversy," MPRA Paper 78814, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Amoah, Anthony & Ferrini, Silvia & Schaafsma, Marije, 2019. "Electricity outages in Ghana: Are contingent valuation estimates valid?," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    17. Zhao, Jinhua & Kling, Catherine L., 2001. "A new explanation for the WTP/WTA disparity," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 73(3), pages 293-300, December.
    18. Christina McGranaghan & Steven G. Otto, 2022. "Choice uncertainty and the endowment effect," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 65(1), pages 83-104, August.
    19. Drouvelis, Michalis & Sonnemans, Joep, 2017. "The endowment effect in games," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 240-262.
    20. Tsur, Matan, 2008. "The selectivity effect of past experience on purchasing decisions: Implications for the WTA-WTP disparity," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 29(5), pages 739-746, November.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    experimental; uncertainty; wtp-wta disparity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C9 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments
    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:apl:wpaper:08-07. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: O. Ashton Morgan (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deappus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.