TY  - CPAPER 
AB  - The use of experimental economics in valuation of market and non-market goods has grown considerably over the past few years. The ability of experimental auctions (EAs) to reveal consumer preferences and their malleability have been greatly praised by researchers across the profession. Because of the high cost of conducting EAs, researchers have a vested interest in extracting as much information as possible from the research sample, usually presenting multiple products or product alternatives to participants. In the last decade large amounts of work has been done to improve the methodology and design of EAs. However, choosing how many products or product alternatives to use has no clear guideline. Findings of this study support a “choice overload” phenomenon even with a relatively small number of products used for auction. Mean willingness to pay was found to be a decreasing function of the number of alternatives presented to participants. A heteroscedastic error variance scaler was estimated and it was found to be a decreasing function of the number of alternatives presented, implying more variance across responses as the number of alternatives increases.
AU  - Chavez, Daniel
AU  - Palma, Marco
DA  - 2015
DA  - 2015
DO  - 10.22004/ag.econ.202164
DO  - doi
ID  - 202164
KW  - Institutional and Behavioral Economics
KW  - Research Methods/Statistical Methods
KW  - Choice Overload
KW  - Experimental Economics
KW  - Heteroscedastic Error Variance
KW  - Willingness to Pay
L1  - https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/202164/files/Off%20the%20reservation%20AAEA.pdf
L2  - https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/202164/files/Off%20the%20reservation%20AAEA.pdf
L4  - https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/202164/files/Off%20the%20reservation%20AAEA.pdf
LA  - eng
LA  - English
LK  - https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/202164/files/Off%20the%20reservation%20AAEA.pdf
N2  - The use of experimental economics in valuation of market and non-market goods has grown considerably over the past few years. The ability of experimental auctions (EAs) to reveal consumer preferences and their malleability have been greatly praised by researchers across the profession. Because of the high cost of conducting EAs, researchers have a vested interest in extracting as much information as possible from the research sample, usually presenting multiple products or product alternatives to participants. In the last decade large amounts of work has been done to improve the methodology and design of EAs. However, choosing how many products or product alternatives to use has no clear guideline. Findings of this study support a “choice overload” phenomenon even with a relatively small number of products used for auction. Mean willingness to pay was found to be a decreasing function of the number of alternatives presented to participants. A heteroscedastic error variance scaler was estimated and it was found to be a decreasing function of the number of alternatives presented, implying more variance across responses as the number of alternatives increases.
PY  - 2015
PY  - 2015
T1  - Off the reservation: Pushing the bounds of rationality in experimental auctions
TI  - Off the reservation: Pushing the bounds of rationality in experimental auctions
UR  - https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/202164/files/Off%20the%20reservation%20AAEA.pdf
Y1  - 2015
T2  - Paper6482
ER  -