How People Respond to Contingent Valuation Questions: A Verbal Protocol Analysis of Willingness to Pay for an Environmental Regulation

This paper investigates what a respondent is thinking when answering a willingness-to-pay question in a contingent valuation, using a "think aloud" technique from psychology called verbal protocol analysis. The willingness-to-pay responses we observed seem to be constructed from a variety of considerations, including an obligation to pay a fair share of the cost of the solution and signaling concern for a larger set of environmental issues. The finding that respondents seem to construct their values at the time they are asked, rather than reporting a more well-defined value, is seen as consistent with over two decades of research on the psychology of decision making. Potential uses of verbal protocols in contingent valuation studies are also discussed.