Complexity in Choice Experiments: Choice of the Status Quo Alternative and Implications for Welfare Measurement

By Peter Boxall, Wiktor L. Adamowicz, A. Moon. 2009

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the propensity of respondents to choose the status quo (SQ) or current situation alternative as a function of complexity in two separate state-of-the-world choice experiments. Complexity in each choice set was characterized as the number of single and multiple changes in levels of attributes from the current situation and the order of the choice task in the sequence of multiple tasks provided to respondents. We show that increasing complexity leads to increased choice of the SQ and that a respondent’s age and level of education also influenced this choice. We outline the effects of the alternate approaches for incorporating the SQ into welfare measurement. These findings have implications for the design of stated preference experiments, examining passive use values and for empirical analysis leading to welfare measurement.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/153280c563c2f31dc843869c2f381c44a19d4449

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Citations in the corpus

Using Internet in Stated Preference Surveys: A Review and Comparison of Survey Modes (2011, unknown): “Promising research explicitly studying complexity, information processing and effort allocation include Berrens et al. (2004) and Lienhoop and Fischer (2009) for CV, Meyerhoff and Liebe (2009) and Boxall et al. (2009) for CM, and DeShazo and Fermo (2002) comparing both SP approaches.”
Stated and inferred attribute non-attendance in a design of designs approach (2014, background): “Influences of choice task complexity have been analysed in terms of several issues such as error variance (e.g., Caussade et al., 2005; Meyerhoff et al., 2014) or the number of status quo choices (e.g., Boxall et al., 2009).”
Comparing Responses from Internet and Paper-Based Collection Methods in more Complex Stated Preference Environmental Valuation Surveys (2011, background): “If the status quo is selected in all choice tasks, it might be an indication of some form of protest (von Haefen et al. 2005, Boxall et al. 2009).”
Contemporary Guidance for Stated Preference Studies (2017, background): “2002; Meyerhoff, Bartczak, and Liebe 2012), statistical outlier detection (Belsley, Kuh, and Welsch 2005), and the identification of respondents who answer either always “yes” or always “no” to every valuation question (Kristrom 1997; Carson 2000; von Haefen et al. 2005; Boxall et al. 2009; Meyerhof”