A comparison of approaches to mitigate hypothetical bias

We compare two approaches to mitigating hypothetical bias. The study design includes three treatments: an actual payment treatment, a contingent valuation (CV) treatment with a follow-up certainty question, and a CV treatment with a cheap talk script. Our results suggest that both the follow-up certainty treatment and the cheap talk treatment produce willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates consistent with the actual payment treatment. However, the follow-up cer-tainty treatment provides response distributions at all offer amounts that are statistically simi-lar to the actual payment treatment, while the cheap talk treatment provides similar responses only at some offer amounts. Furthermore, the cheap talk treatment is effective only for inexpe-rienced individuals. We conclude that the follow-up certainty approach is more consistent than the cheap talk approach for eliminating hypothetical bias