Opposite impacts of policy and payment consequentiality treatments on willingness-to-pay in a contingent valuation study

ABSTRACT A growing number of studies investigated the effects of additional consequentiality scripts on respondents’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) and/or their beliefs in the survey arena. However, these works barely provide a clear distinction between policy and payment consequentiality, despite the possible varying effects of these two alternative beliefs. This study explored the impacts of additional policy and payment consequentiality scripts on respondents’ WTP and stated beliefs using a split-sample approach. Econometric analyses revealed that the policy and payment consequentiality scripts had significantly positive and negative impacts on respondents’ voting behaviours, respectively. Especially, the latter script was more influential than the former one. The payment consequentiality script was also found to be significantly effective in improving respondents’ stated payment consequentiality beliefs. These results suggest that emphasising payment consequentiality of a survey is important to encourage respondents to exhibit more careful attitudes towards a hypothetical scenario, thereby reducing some forms of bias in stated preference methods.