As part of my PhD research, I would like to conduct an experimental survey aimed at answering the above question and to test whether one or more behaviourally-informed strategies makes any difference to consumer willingness to accept the constraints.
My aim is to estimate the social acceptability of imposing constraints on energy use with a view to maintaining reliable supply and lower future energy costs. The constraints would likely involve a trade-off between private and public benefits, as well as challenging consumer expectations about their rights to use as much energy as they want, as long as they can pay for it.
The survey will be conducted using an existing longitudinal panel comprising 3000 respondents.
Get their respondents:
1. to define what social good outcomes mean to them
2. ask them what, if anything. they personally would give up for each social good outcome to be obtained.
Part of the issue with these approaches is that respondents are very generous when the question is a theoretical one and money doesn't actually come out of their pocket. There is definitely a difference between what people say and what they will do. You have to somehow address that. One approach I have seen is creating a game where there is a monetary prize, and the respondents have to choose how to allocate the monetary prize. So if they really care about a certain social outcome they will actually give up money they won. This kind of approach can be expensive though. A second best alternative is to make the prize be a shot at winning a large prize. So respondents would be giving up lottery tickets towards a large prize. This limits the researcher's expense on prizes.
Kevin Chadwick
Auction design might be the suitable way to address the issue. Kindly go through the article ' Effects of Food-Additive-Information on Consumers’ Willingness to Accept Food with Additives' if of any use.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6266858/
Alcott has been working on this subject. He has a recent paper with Judd Kessler where you can find additional information.
See The Welfare Effects of Nudges: A Case Study of Energy Use Social Comparisons
- Hunt Allcott
- Judd B. Kessler
- AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL: APPLIED ECONOMICS
- VOL. 11, NO. 1, JANUARY 2019
- (pp. 236-76)
I like the monetary game approach mentioned above. What I typically do in these types of situations (though there is certainly no single one-size-fits-all approach) is to do a small sample pre-survey to get a general notion of what people would say in terms of willingness to accept or willingness to pay. I then use that to rephrase the survey for the full distribution of the survey with a bid that the respondent can either accept or reject. If the respondent accepts, then there is a follow-up question of whether or not there is an upper bound that they would be willing to accept. Similarly, if the respondent rejects the bid, then that there is a follow-up question regarding whether or not there is any particular amount that they would be willing to accept. Depending on the situation, this can be followed up with various debriefing questions to see whether or not they understood the question in terms of proper evaluation, etc. And, you always have to ensure that you are not comparing chalk and cheese. And there always needs to be a mechanism for correcting for different valuation responses based on various factors such as income and demographics since that can obviously impact willingness to pay/accept. You may also be able to set up the survey to see if you can get statistically different groups of respondents based on revealed preferences, which may very well cross income, geographic, socioeconomic, and demographic boundaries (www.choicewaves.com).
Rutherford Cd. Johnson - thank you very much for your suggestion. Notwithstanding Joelle Saad-Lessler's very sound warning, above, it makes me consider using a 'staircase' method to estimate a threshold 'willingness to accept' figure.
In response to a scenario that reflects the real-world private costs (and private benefits) of investing in a household appliance that can deliver public benefits (e.g. AC, solar + battery, hot water system), respondents say yes or no to a certain dollar amount of discount on the purchase cost. Depending on the answer, they are then asked if they would accept a slightly greater/lesser amount, and so on until a threshold is reached.
I could also randomly assign two or more differently framed scenario descriptions aimed at mitigating/activating relevant cognitive biases to see if this makes a difference to responses in aggregate. I think this addresses the issue Joelle raised to a certain extent by focusing on the relative difference between acceptable amounts depending on the framing, rather than the absolute amounts people say they are willing to accept.
I could include a question or two to check numeracy. I will also have education level as a proxy for this, as the survey already includes a substantial amount of demographic data, as well as some psychographics on respondents.
Kevin Chadwick The staircase approach can be good since it gets away from open-ended single-step follow-on questions to a single bid. It can, on the other hand, annoy respondents by having to do so many iterations, so it depends on your target respondent pool and their likely willingness to help. If you can get staircase data, that's even better.
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