Improving Validity Experiments of Contingent Valuation Methods: Results of Efforts to Reduce the Disparity of Hypothetical and Actual Willingness to Pay

Abstract

Independent samples and paired responses of adults were used to test differences between hypothetical and actual willingness to pay (WTP) for an art print elicited using an open-ended WTP question. We attempted to overcome hypothesized reasons for divergences between cash and hypothetical WTP by asking respondents not report what they thought the market price was for the good and to act as if this was a real market. The results reject equality of hypothetical and actual WTP, but the differences are smaller than in other experiments, with hypothetical WTP being two times larger than actual WTP.