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The Influence of Design Dimensions on Stated Choices in an Environmental Context

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Abstract

Discrete choice experiments are increasingly used in the context of environmental valuation. However, there is still little known about the influence of the complexity of the choice task on model outcomes. In this paper we investigate task complexity in terms of the design dimensionality of the choice experiment by systematically varying the number of choice sets, alternatives, attributes, and levels as well as the level range. We largely follow a Design of Designs approach originally introduced in transportation. First, we analyse the influence of the design dimensionality on participants’ dropout behaviour finding that the probability to drop-out of the survey is influenced by socio-demographic characteristics and increases with the number of choice sets, attributes as well as with designs having five alternatives. Second, we investigate the impact of the design dimensions on stated choices by estimating a multinomial logit model, and heteroskedastic logit models. Results show that the error term variance is influenced by socio-demographic characteristics as well as by all design dimensions. Moreover, we find that accounting for the impact of the design dimension on the error variance does not significantly change willingness to pay estimates.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their very valuable comments. Also we would like to thank Helen Lauff (Link-Institut) for her advice and patience while implementing our Design of Designs approach in the survey software. Funding for this research was provided by the Federal German Ministry of Education and Research (Fkz. 033L029G; Fkz 01LL0909A) and is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Landscape and Environmental Planning, Technische Universität Berlin, Straße des 17. Juni 145, 10623 , Berlin, Germany

    Jürgen Meyerhoff & Malte Oehlmann

  2. Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute, Institute for International Forestry and Forest Economics, Leuschnerstraße 91, 21031 , Hamburg, Germany

    Priska Weller

Authors
  1. Jürgen Meyerhoff
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  2. Malte Oehlmann
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  3. Priska Weller
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jürgen Meyerhoff.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Tables 11, 12 and 13.

Table 11 Attribute levels for designs with two levels
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Table 12 Attribute levels for designs with three levels
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Table 13 Attribute levels for designs with four levels
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Appendix 2

See Tables 14 and 15.

Table 14 Linear regression number of drop-outs and design dimensions
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Table 15 Heteroskedastic logit with order effects \(\mathrm{CS}_{2}-\mathrm{CS}_{24}\)
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Meyerhoff, J., Oehlmann, M. & Weller, P. The Influence of Design Dimensions on Stated Choices in an Environmental Context. Environ Resource Econ 61, 385–407 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-014-9797-5

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