Impact of Ex‐Ante Hypothetical Bias Mitigation Methods on Attribute Non‐Attendance in Choice Experiments

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, we use survey data from Nigeria on consumers' preferences for organic products to investigate the impact of ex‐ante hypothetical bias mitigation methods (Cheap Talk and Honesty Priming) on respondents' attribute non‐attendance. We employ a framework that allows us to jointly examine the response to the stated choice component and the response to the attribute processing questions, while avoiding the potential endogeneity bias and measurement error problems arising from some attribute non‐attendance methods. Our results show that the incidence of attribute non‐attendance varies across the treatments in general, with significant difference in attribute non‐attendance rates between respondents exposed to the mitigation strategies (Honesty Priming and Cheap Talk) and the baseline group. We also find that the low willingness to pay values for the honesty priming task appear to correspond with the lowest attribute non‐attendance rates reported for all the attributes (especially price) and might reflect a more realistic valuation of the attributes.