Willingness to pay of committed citizens: A field experiment

•We study citizen behavior in three contingent valuation scenarios on air pollution.•Scenarios put a different emphasis on the personal or on the societal perspective.•Scenarios involve different degrees of environmental protection.•Citizens are generated by using a petition as a commitment device.•Signing influences WTP values in both personal and societal perspective scenarios.

In this paper, we propose a behavioral approach to determine the extent to which the consumer/citizen distinction affects interpretations of monetary values in stated preferences methods. We perform a field experiment dealing with air pollution, where some (randomly selected) subjects are given the opportunity to behave politically by signing a petition for environmental protection prior to stating their private preferences in a standard contingent valuation exercise. We show that signing has the potential to influence respondents' willingness to pay values. Results indicate that even market-like situations are not immune to citizen behavior.