After several decades of academic research on the contingent valuation (CV) method a consistent behavioral explanation of ‘hypothetical bias’ is still lacking. Based on evidence from economics, economic psychology and the political sciences, I propose an explanation that is based on two simple working hypotheses about respondent behaviour in contingent valuation surveys. The first hypothesis is...

Consensus means general agreement among possibly di erent views, while dichotomus voting rules are a means of making decisions by using votes to settle di erences of view. How then can it often be the case that a committee whose only formal mechanism for decision-making is a dichotomus voting rule reaches a consensus? In this paper, based on a game-theoretic model developed in three previous pa...

In this paper, we study starting point bias in double-bounded contingent valuation surveys. This phenomenon arises in applications that use multiple valuation questions. Indeed, response to follow-up valuation questions may be influenced by the bid proposed in the initial valuation question. Previous researches have been conducted in order to control for such an effect. However, they find that ...

We evaluate factor analysis and multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) as tools for the analysis of voter decisions over a series of dichotomous choices. We simulate binary voting data with a known form and illustrate that standard factor analyses of these types of data yield additional artifactual dimensions. This effect may be exacerbated by the choice of inter-voter measures of similarity used as i...

Single-site recreation demand and dichotomous choice contingent valuation analyses are typically conducted by implementing models containing strong parametric assumptions, which are rarely underpinned by theoretical arguments. This work illustrates how these assumptions can be relaxed and the estimation conducted semiparametrically by using generalized additive models (GAMs). This approach dire...

Regression via ordinary least squares (OLS) is a commonly applied statistical technique in political science. However, when the dependent variable is dichotomous (0-1) rather than continuous, ordinary least squares becomes an inefficient estimation technique, and the underlying linear probability model (LPM) that is being estimated represents a poor apriori choice of model specification (Aldric...

A common mechanism to elicit risk preferences requires a respondent to make a series of dichotomous choices. A recurring problem with this mechanism is a frequently observed tendency to switch from the less to the more risky choice multiple times, multiple switching behavior. We introduce an instructional variation our evidence suggests practically eliminates such behavior. We read a script emp...

In this paper we provide a general model of ‘quaternary’dichotomous voting rules (QVRs), namely, voting rules for making collective dichotomous decisions (to accept or reject a proposal), based on vote pro…les in which four options are available to each voter: voting (‘yes’, ‘no’or ‘abstaining’) or staying home and not turning out. The model covers most of actual real-world dichotomus rules, wh...