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Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions?: An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues

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Book cover Elicitation of Preferences

Abstract

Participants in contingent valuation surveys and jurors setting punitive damages in civil trials provide answers denominated in dollars. These answers are better understood as expressions of attitudes than as indications of economic preferences. Well-established characteristics of attitudes and of the core process of affective valuation explain several robust features of dollar responses: high correlations with other measures of attractiveness or aversiveness, insensitivity to scope, preference reversals, and the high variability of dollar responses relative to other measures of the same attitude.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    Daniel Kahneman

  2. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

    Ilana Ritov

  3. University of Texas, Austin, USA

    David Schkade

  4. Department of Psychology, Indiana University, 1011 E. 10th St., Bloomington, IN, 47405-7007, USA

    Steven J. Sherman

  5. School of Information & Management and Systems, University of California, 102 South Hall #4600, Berkeley, California, 94720-4600, USA

    Hal R. Varian

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  1. Daniel Kahneman
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

    Baruch Fischhoff

  2. Department of Economics, Northwestern University, USA

    Charles F. Manski

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Kahneman, D., Ritov, I., Schkade, D., Sherman, S.J., Varian, H.R. (1999). Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions?: An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues. In: Fischhoff, B., Manski, C.F. (eds) Elicitation of Preferences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1406-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1406-8_8

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