On the use of honesty priming task to mitigate hypothetical bias in choice
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We test whether the use of an honesty priming task from the social psychology literature can help mitigate hypothetical bias in stated preference choice experiments (CE). Using a between-sample design, we conducted experiments with five treatments: (1) hypothetical CE without cognitive task, (2) hypothetical CE with cheap talk script, (3) hypothetical CE with neutral priming task, (4) hypothetical CE with honesty priming task, and (5) non-hypothetical CE. Results generally suggest that marginal willingness to pay estimates from treatment 4 where subjects are given honesty priming task before the choice experiment are not statistically different from marginal valuations from treatment 5 where subjects are in a non-hypothetical choice experiment. Values from both these treatments are significantly lower than those from other three hypothetical treatments (treatments 1-3). Using hold out tasks, our results also suggest that one could get higher percentage of correct predictions of participants’ choices in treatments 4 and 5 than in treatments 1-3 and that there is no significant difference in percentage of correct predictions between treatments 4 and 5.