We test whether the use of an honesty priming task from the social psychology literature can help mitigate hypothetical bias in stated preference choice experiments (CE). Using a between-sample design, we conducted experiments with five treatments: (1) hypothetical CE without cognitive task, (2)...

The aim of the paper is to assess consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for a local food produced in a less-favoured area in the Aragon region (Spain). In particular, we examine whether consumers value lamb meat products (lamb and suckling lamb) labelled as “Ojinegra from Teruel”,...

The European Union is contemplating making the provision of nutritional labels in food products mandatory. Using data collected from food shoppers, we assessed consumers' valuation of nutritional labels by analysing their willingness to pay a premium for a box of cookies with a nutritional...

Due to the importance of comparability and external validity of results, nonhypothetical experimental methods are increasingly used to elicit consumers' willingness to pay for various goods. Two of the increasingly popular preference elicitation methods are the nonhypothetical choice experiments...

Scope insensitivity is a popular anomaly in many valuation studies. Although scope insensitivity is a problem that may be present in any valuation method, most previous literature has focused on evaluating scope sensitivity within the context of contingent valuation applications. Nevertheless,...

Obesity is a growing concern. New World Health Organization (WHO) figures indicate that obesity is spreading around the world as a "global epidemic." According to the WHO, there are more people suffering overweight related problems than malnutrition. Globally there are more than 1 billion adults...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/30/04.

The US population now leads the world in obesity rates. The estimated societal cost of the overweight and obesity issue exceeds $115 billion. Policy may play a role if economically justifiable but conflicting interests exist.