Dr. Erlend Dancke Sandorf - Assessing the impact of “professional” respondents using an Integrated Choice and Latent Variable model

Dr. Erlend Dancke Sandorf, Research Fellow at the Centre for Environmental and Resource Economics, Umeå, Sweden.

Assessing the impact of “professional” respondents using an Integrated Choice and Latent Variable model.

8 February 2017, 11:00 to 12:00.
University of Leeds, Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) Room 1.11.

Abstract:

Online panels are increasingly used for stated preference research, and members of such panels receive compensation for each completed survey. One concern is that over time this creates professional respondents who answer surveys purely for the monetary compensation. We identify professional respondents using data on panel tenure, average number of surveys per month, response latency, survey satisficing indicators and self-reported effort measures. Using an ICLV model we find that professional respondents are less likely to choose the 'opt-out' alternative, state higher levels of effort, and engage in less survey satisficing. Furthermore, the model performs worse in terms of predicting more professional respondents' choices relative to less professional respondents. We discuss the impact of professional respondents on the willingness-to-accept measures and provide a few suggestions for future research.