The value of familiarity: Effects of knowledge and objective signals on willingness to pay for a public good

By Jacob LaRiviere, Mikoaj Czajkowski, N. Hanley, Margrethe Aanesen, Jannike Falk-Petersen, D. Tinch. 2014

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We design and conduct a field experiment in which treated subjects receive a precise and objective signal regarding their knowledge about a public good before estimating their WTP for it. We find that the causal effect of objective signals about the accuracy of a subject׳s knowledge for a public good can dramatically affect their valuation for it: treatment caused a significant increase of $85–$129 in WTP for well-informed individuals. We find no such effect for less informed subjects. Our results imply that WTP estimates for public goods are not only a function of true information states of the respondents but beliefs about those information states.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a41d209df06fa45e7b0651f21da9cb446634d15c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In General Decision Sciences

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

Contemporary Guidance for Stated Preference Studies (2017, background): “…(Rolfe, Bennett, and Louviere 2002); (c) sequencing, if more than one valuation question is included in a questionnaire (Day and Prades 2010; Alevy, List, and Adamowicz 2011; Day et al. 2012); and (d) respondents’ prior experience and knowledge (Cameron and Englin 1997; LaRiviere et al. 2014).”