Effects of alternative elicitation formats in discrete choice experiments

An elicitation format prevalently applied in DCE is to offer each respondent a sequenceof choice tasks containing more than two choice options. However, empirical evidenceindicates that repeated choice tasks influence choice behavior through institutionallearning, fatigue, value learning, and strategic response. The study reported in this paperemploys a split sample approach based on field surveys using a single binary elicitationformat with a majority vote implementation as the baseline to expand the research oneffects of sequential binary DCE formats. We provide evidence for effects caused byinstitutional learning and either strategic behavior or value learning after respondentsanswered repeated choice questions. However, we did not find any indications forstrategic behavior caused by awareness of having multiple choices. The choice between asequential and a single elicitation format may thus imply a trade-off between decreasedchoice accuracy and potentially increased strategic behavior due to an incentiveincompatible mechanism. Further research is needed to explore strategic behaviorinduced by incentive incompatible elicitation formats using alternative approaches thatare not compromised by a confounded baseline, that facilitate the differentiation betweenvalue learning and strategic behavior, and that allow the use of less restrictive modelspecifications. Such research should also investigate the effects of varying incentivesinduced by the order in which choice questions are presented to respondents.