A randomized response approach to dichotomous choice contingent valuation

In this paper we combine dichotomous choice contingent valuation (DC-CV) with the randomized response (RR) method for asking sensitive survey questions. RR increases respondents' anonymity by allowing them to answer a sensitive question without revealing, with certainty, their true response. We combine RR with DC-CV to test for response effects in the valuation of a public good, in a setting of expected social pressure. While there are practical implementation issues, our findings suggest that the RR technique is a useful tool for exploring social context effects. Rather than generalize from our pre-test results, we instead emphasize the development of the experimental technique.