Empirical Testing of Strategic Voting and its Implications for Choice Experiments

Strategic voting in valuation choice experiments violates the common modeling assumption that everyone votes for his unconditionally most preferred choice. This presents a challenge to accurate estimation of values. We provide an examination of strategic voting in a homegrown value experiment that mimics choice experiments. In this way, we can test whether “prompting” participants to think about the others’ vote affects their vote. We reject this hypothesis. We also solicit participant perceptions about the vote distribution and test whether these perceptions affect their vote. We find that they do, but that the percentage of strategic voters is small.