An Experimental Testing of Anchoring Effects in Discrete Choice Questions

This paper re-examines the openended/dichotomous choice question in the lab. It hasearlier been suggested that the dichotomous choiceformat suffers from anchoring and yea-saying.Comparing actual economic commitments for a privategood with a significant market value, we cannot rejectthe null hypothesis of equal WTP for the two formats.We conclude that problems with DC might be due toissues of how the survey is framed, not the DCquestion itself. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000