Choice Certainty and Consistency in Repeated Choice Experiments

By Roy Brouwer, T. Dekker, John Rolfe, Jill Windle. 2010

160 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The main objective of this study is to examine how repeated choice affects preference learning in stated preference experiments. We test different hypotheses related to preference learning by analyzing response patterns and asking respondents in a choice experiment to report their experienced certainty when going through the choice tasks. In a split-sample test, we show that follow-up choice certainty questions are procedural invariant. The self-reported certainty results indicate that learning occurs, but econometric testing procedures do not identify any significant impact of learning effects on parameter estimates or variance across choice tasks. Additional tests of choice consistency suggest that preferences in the choice experiment are stable and coherent.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a939d878f6be2647d7460f363505b476785b8253

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Citations in the corpus

Not bored yet – revisiting respondent fatigue in stated choice experiments (2012, methodology): “Brouwer et al. (2009) used mixed logit models in the context of a five task and three alternative experiment, finding increasing scale parameters consistent with learning effects, a suggestion that was confirmed by an analysis of respondent reported certainty measures.”
The first time is the hardest: A test of ordering effects in choice experiments (2012, background): “A number of studies find no or small differences in preferences based on choices made in the beginning and choices made at the end of a sequence (e.g., Carlsson and Martinsson 2001, Johnson and Bingham 2001, Hanley et al. 2002, Brouwer et al. 2010).”
Contemporary Guidance for Stated Preference Studies (2017, background): “Further, if respondents learn about the change being valued and their preferences evolve or converge through the sequence of questions, then answers to later questions in the sequence may better reflect actual preferences than answers to earlier questions (Holmes and Boyle 2005; Bateman et al. 2008a”