Description:
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