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Referendum Contingent Valuation, Anchoring, and Willingness to Pay for Public Goods

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  • Donald Green
  • Karen Jacowitz
  • Daniel Kahneman
  • Daniel McFadden

Abstract

This study reports on experiments that examine anchoring in single referendum questions in contingent valuation surveys on willingness to pay for public goods, and on objective estimation. Strong anchoring effects are found that lead to systematically higher estimated mean responses from Yes/No referendum responses than from open-ended responses. This response pattern is similar for contingent valuation questions and for objective estimation questions. The paper concludes that psychometric anchoring effects, rather than incentive effects, are the likely cause of results commonly found in contingent valuation studies, and that the currently popular single referendum elicitation format is highly vulnerable to anchoring.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Donald Green & Karen Jacowitz & Daniel Kahneman & Daniel McFadden, 1995. "Referendum Contingent Valuation, Anchoring, and Willingness to Pay for Public Goods," Working Papers _010, University of California at Berkeley, Econometrics Laboratory Software Archive.
  • Handle: RePEc:wop:calbem:_010
    Note: This paper was presented by Daniel McFadden at the World Congress of the Econometric Society, August 1995. The manuscript is in compressed postscript format, viewable in browsers that can spawn an external viewer like ghostscript.Figures 1 - 15. Please note that if you view the figures, you will need to have the viewer rotate them 90 degrees, from a portrait to landscape orientation.
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