Researchers using questionnaires to elicit preferences must decide whether to include response options that allow respondents to express "no opinion." Using a split-sample design, we explore the implications of alternative answer formats including and not including no-opinion responses in an...

A few recent studies report that preferences elicited from a two-alternative choice format are different from those elicited from a three-alternative choice format, when both choice set designs contain a status quo option. We hypothesize that the choice format effect might disappear when we...

Omitted, misspecified, or mismeasured spatially varying characteristics are a cause for concern in hedonic house price models. Spatial econometrics or spatial fixed effects have become popular ways of addressing these concerns. We discuss the limitations of standard spatial approaches to hedonic...

Views of natural areas and green space may have value quite apart from access to those lands. Using 25 years of home sales data from St. Louis County, Missouri, and modern geographic information system tools to measure views, we estimate a hedonic property fixed-effects model that captures the...

In contingent valuation, the willingness to pay for hypothetical programs may be affected by the order in which programs are presented to respondents. With inclusive lists, economic theory suggests that sequence effects should be expected. However, when policy makers allocate public budgets to...

One of the main issues on the research agenda regarding stated preference methods concerns the heterogeneity of preferences either within or between individuals. We present a multilevel mixed model (MMM) to capture heterogeneity in deterministic utility components, instead of simply leaving them...

Using multiple choice tasks per respondent in discrete choice experiment studies increases the amount of available information. However, respondents’ learning and fatigue may lead to changes in observed utility function preference (taste) parameters, as well as the variance in its error term...

We demonstrate how choice experiment survey methods can be used to guide ecosystem restoration efforts. We use a choice experiment survey to estimate willingness to pay (WTP) for different attributes of restored grassland ecosystems. We find that the presence of nearby grasslands increases a...

In a site-selection choice experiment various hypotheses are tested related to spatial heterogeneity in willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental improvements. Spatial heterogeneity is measured through distance-decay effects, substitute sites inside and outside the experiment’s choice set,...

A contingent valuation study conducted in China, Sweden, and the United States was used to investigate citizens’ willingness to pay (WTP) for reducing CO2 emissions. We find that a majority of the respondents in all three countries believe that the mean global temperature has increased over...