A de-biased direct question approach to measuring consumers' willingness to pay

  • Knowledge of consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) is a prerequisite to profitable price-setting. To gauge consumers' WTP, practitioners often rely on a direct single question approach in which consumers are asked to explicitly state their WTP for a product. Despite its popularity among practitioners, this approach has been found to suffer from hypothetical bias. In this paper, we propose a rigorous method that improves the accuracy of the direct single question approach. Specifically, we systematically assess the hypothetical biases associated with the direct single question approach and explore ways to de-bias it. Our results show that by using the de-biasing procedures we propose, we can generate a de-biased direct single question approach that is accurate enough to be useful for managerial decision-making. We validate this approach with two studies in this paper.

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Author:Reto HofstetterORCiDGND, Klaus Matthias MillerORCiDGND, Harley KrohmerGND, Z. John ZhangORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-780461
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2020.04.006
ISSN:0167-8116
Parent Title (English):International journal of research in marketing
Publisher:Elsevier
Place of publication:Amsterdam
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2021/03/19
Date of first Publication:2020/06/23
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2023/11/24
Tag:Choice experiments; Demand estimation; Direct estimation; Hypothetical bias; Market research; Pricing; Single question approach; Willingness to pay
Volume:38.2021
Issue:1
Page Number:15
First Page:70
Last Page:84
HeBIS-PPN:516178423
Institutes:Wirtschaftswissenschaften
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 33 Wirtschaft / 330 Wirtschaft
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International