PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Skeie, Magnus Aagaard
AU  - Lindhjem, Henrik
AU  - Navrud, Ståle
AU  - Otterbring, Tobias
TI  - How Sensitive are Environmental Values to Payment Card Design in Contingent Valuation?
AID  - 10.3368/le.101.3.061924-0053R
DP  - 2025 Mar 07
TA  - Land Economics
PG  - 061924-0053R
4099  - http://le.uwpress.org/content/early/2025/02/28/le.101.3.061924-0053R.short
4100  - http://le.uwpress.org/content/early/2025/02/28/le.101.3.061924-0053R.full
AB  - Contingent valuation studies of people’s willingness-to-pay for ecosystem services are frequently used to inform the social benefit-cost analysis of environmental protection measures. While contingent valuation is generally accepted in this context, response anomalies exist. Drawing on the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic in psychology and the context effects literature, we examine the impact of subtle design variation on people’s willingness-to-pay. In a split-sample national survey of willingness-to-pay to prevent coastal environmental damages from oil spills, different payment card elicitation formats significantly affect mean willingness-to-pay. This underscores the importance of a research agenda on the effects of subtle design variation on environmental value estimates.