Incentivizing Stated Preference Elicitation with Choice-Matching in the Field

Stated preferences should ideally be elicited in ways providing respondents with economic incentives to report them truthfully. Survey design conditions for such incentive compatibility typically rely on consequentiality; that is, respondents believing that their survey responses matter for the final decision. By contrast, this study aims at testing empirically a novel theoretical approach, which allows for incentive-compatible elicitation of preferences towards a hypothetical good. Proposed by Cvitanić et al. (2019), the choice-matching approach is applied here to elicit stated preferences towards a public good. While choice-matching has been originally designed for incentivizing responses to a multiple choice question, we illustrate its possible application to an open-ended question. To that end, we conduct an online experiment mirroring a standard stated preference survey as used for valuation of public goods. We implement two versions of the survey questionnaire: one employing the incentive-compatible choice-matching approach and another representing a common non-incentivized setting. We find that the open-ended willingness-to-pay values are statistically significantly higher when stated under choice-matching than when expressed in the typical, non-incentivized conditions. The paper discusses why the results may be regarded as support of the use of choice-matching for stated preference elicitation