The impact of varying amounts of more and less salient product information upon consumer willingness to pay.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the impact of varying amounts of moreand less salient product information on the amount of money consumers are willing to pay tobuy a particular brand. In particular, we integrate Random Utility Theory (RUT) with thenotion of missing information and hypothesise that if one fails to include all salient attributesin a choice study, estimates of willingness to pay may be biased. By integrating the frameworkof RUT with the concept of missing information and consumer choice, our researchrecognises correlations between attributes varied in choice experiments and the randomutility component. The results of our choice experiments demonstrate that the amount ofinformation presented impacts the amount consumers are willing to pay to choose particularbrands. While researchers may never fully understand the choices consumer make, thisresearch demonstrates that one can make systematic and incremental gains in understandingconsumer choices associated with the amount and salience of information provided toconsumers on which to base their choices.