Analysing decision behaviour in stated preference surveys: A consumer psychological approach

This paper applies a typology adapted from the consumer psychology literature to a Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) survey. We argue that the typology is helpful as a way of identifying responses that contain useful information on preferences for the environmental good in question, relative to those which are unlikely to contain such information. Applying this framework to a CVM study of agri-environmental payments in Germany, we find that some 90% of responses are preference-revealing; this distribution changes when the framing of the good is changed. The typology may be of most use during the design stage of future CVM studies, since it enables researchers to increase the fraction of responses that are useful.