Individual sensitivity to framing effects

Surveys are sometimes viewed with suspicion when used to provide economic values, since they have been proved to be sensitive to framing effects. However, the extent to which those effects may vary between individuals has received little attention. Are some individuals less sensitive to framing effects than others ? How to detect them ? These are the questions addressed in this paper. We use the theory of social representation to assign to each individual a new variable that is proved to be a proxy for the individual’s sensitivity to framing effects. We examine two framing effects which are known to have a significant effect on valuation, namely, starting-point bias and willingness-to-pay and willingness-toaccept divergence. It is proved that the representation variable allows researchers to gather new and relevant information to limit the impact of framing effects.