The Link Between Response Time and Choices in Choice Experiments

Response time is a possible indicator of the cognitive processes employed by choice experiment participants when making choices. The decision-making literature suggests a positive correlation between slower response time and rational thinking, which is consistent with standard theories of decision-making. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between response time and respondents’ choices. We disentangle preference and willingness-to-pay estimates and explore whether response time sheds light on these aspects. Our approach entails dividing the data (ordered by response time) into three subsets. While the effects of response time have been investigated previously, this paper’s emphasis is on assessing the time respondents require to answer self-administered face-to-face stated-preference surveys. To accurately capture response time, we make use of electronic gadgets for data collection instead of traditional paperbased methods. We use data on water-efficient technologies to test the impact of response time. Using generalised mixed logit models, we compare results from an analysis of average responses, fast responses, slow responses and whole sample data. Overall, we find that response times did not affect results.