This paper reports results from a contingent valuation based public good experiment conducted in the African nation of Botswana. In a sample of university students, we find evidence that stated willingness to contribute to a public good in a hypothetical setting is higher than actual...

Recent papers have suggested that use of a so-called Repeated Opt-Out Reminder (ROOR) might mitigate hypothetical bias in stated Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE), but evidence so far has only been circumstantial. We provide the first comprehensive test of whether a ROOR can actually mitigate...

After several decades of academic research on the contingent valuation (CV) method a consistent behavioral explanation of 'hypothetical bias' is still lacking. Based on evidence from economics, economic psychology and the political sciences, I propose an explanation that is based on two simple...

Low-quality infrastructure services are persistent in developing countries, a situation mainly affecting the poorest households in contexts of high rates of informal access and heavily subsidized services. This paper exploits choice experiments, specifically designed for formal and informal...

We conduct a within-sample test of hypothetical bias and parameter equality between a hypothetical stated choice (SC) experiment using pictures and a real choice (RC) experiments using products. With exception of the none-of-these alternative-specific dummy, we cannot reject parameter equality...

 Hypothetical bias is a persistent problem in stated preference studies. We propose and test a method for reducing hypothetical bias based on the cognitive dissonance literature in social psychology. A central element of this literature is that people prefer not to take inconsistent stands and...

Stated preference techniques have been used to place values on public goods by directly asking individuals to provide their personal values and opinions. This method has consistently resulted in the emergence of hypothetical bias. Several insights from the psychology literature suggest that...

The most persistently troubling empirical result in the contingent valuation method literature is the tendency for hypothetical willingness to pay to overestimate real willingness to pay. Two approaches, ex-ante and ex-post, have been developed to mitigate or eliminate the overstatement of...

In this paper, we estimate the social net benefits of curbside recycling. Benefits are estimated using survey data on household willingness to pay (WTP) from over 4,000 households across 40 western U.S. cities. We calibrate WTP for hypothetical bias using an experimental design that contrasts...