Consequences of Participant Inattention with an Application to Carbon Taxes for Meat Products

Despite widespread use in nonmarket valuation, data quality remains an ongoing challenge for survey methods. One key concern is whether participants attentively respond to survey questions or whether they exert less than full effort. To determine the prevalence and consequences of inattention bias in surveys, we estimate how meat demand varies across people who do and do not miss trap questions. Using a split-sample design with discrete choice experiments for meat products, we explore three different trap questions to determine how many potentially inattentive respondents are identified by each method. We find that individuals who miss trap questions respond differently to the choice experiment than individuals who correctly answer the trap question. Inattention generates vastly different compensating variation estimates of a carbon tax, ranging from 3.56 cents per meal choice for the least attentive to 6.13 cents per meal choice for the most attentive.