Abstract

Economic Survey Response Behavior: Experiments Using a
Virtual Laboratory

Harish Chand
Daniel McFadden

The VLAB project explores the use of the World Wide Web as a medium
for survey research and decision-making experiments.  It will be
argued that the Web is a particularly intriguing medium because of its ability
to: (1) easily embed experimental designs in a seamless and
transparent manner; (2) incorporate multiple media in the experimental
design; (3) allow remote interaction in decision making experiments;
and (4) record process tracing ("clickstream") data.  This last
characteristic holds especially great potential to improve our
understanding of the choice process and to augment choice models.
Experiments in the areas of contingent valuation, anchoring, and conjoint
analysis will be demonstrated. Some early results will hopefully be
available in time for the symposium.