Visual Attribute Non-Attendance in a Food Choice Experiment: Results From an Eye-tracking Study

Respondents in choice experiments (CEs) may ignore some of the attributes presented to them when evaluation alternatives in a choice task, which has been referred to as attribute non-attendance (ANA). Previous studies have shown that ANA may impact both the model fit as the WTP estimates for the presented attributes. We used a new approach and accounted for the issue of ANA, by using eye-tracking measures. By accounting for visual ANA, the coefficients from the ANA model differ from the model which did not account for this issue. This clearly indicates that assuming that respondents in a CE attended to all attributes in all of the choice tasks biases your estimation results.