This workshop is postponed to 2022 in the hope that travelling and offline meetings will be possible then. Thanks you your understanding, we hope to see you in 2022!
Local Organizers: Jürgen Meyerhoff, Julian Sagebiel
Scientific Committee: Vic Adamowicz, Klaus Glenk, Robert Johnston
Background and Aims
The need for information on economic values in the absence of market choices—including information on non-use or passive use values—has led to an unquestionable demand for value estimates from stated preference methods. These methods have also been subject to ongoing questions regarding validity. Although there has been extensive work to assess and establish the validity of stated preference methods over the past three decades, much of this work has focused on contingent valuation (or single binary choice) methods. The applicability of this work to discrete choice experiments (DCEs)—which now represent a large proportion of stated preference applications—is not always clear. The properties and often-greater complexity of DCE preference elicitation, relative to contingent valuation, can affect the types of validity concerns that are most relevant. Moreover, in many common areas of DCE application, such as transport and marketing, attention to validity concerns has focused heavily on econometrics and experimental design, with less attention elsewhere. This workshop will address a more comprehensive range of topics that are central to the validity of environmental DCEs, including fundamental topics such as questionnaire design and testing, survey mode, consequentiality, information effects, and the treatment of uncertainty.
This one-day workshop brings together worldwide experts on stated preference and DCE design to discuss past and contemporary research related to validity within DCE welfare elicitation. Although the primary focus will be on environmental applications, speakers will also discuss implications for other common application areas such as marketing, health and transport. Sessions will address implications of earlier CV validity research for DCEs, as well as more recent research focusing explicitly on validity within choice modelling. Particular emphasis will be given to non-econometric topics that have been given less explicit attention in the environmental valuation literature, such as the design and use of focus groups, implications of survey mode and different types of online sampling, design of the bid vector, elicitation method and consequentiality, and the treatment of risk and uncertainty, among other topics. A “lightning round” of presentations will also highlight emerging and potentially important areas of research in DCE validity.
The primary goal of the workshop is to provide participants with the knowledge required to develop valid DCE preference elicitation methods capable of withstanding rigorous scrutiny and external peer review. The workshop will also expose participants to the increasing scope of research related to choice modelling validity. As we are aiming for lively debates, ongoing discussion and active participant engagement will be encouraged.
Participation and Submission
Participation in the workshop is free, but due to limited space, we cannot allow for more than 80 participants. Therefore, we would like to ask interested persons to register with Julian Sagebiel (sagebiel@tu-berlin.de) or Jürgen Meyerhoff (Jürgen.meyerhoff@tu-berlin.de) by sending a short email. Also, we ask participants for a contribution of presumably 20 Euro per person to cover the costs for the catering. Registrants will receive a confirmation within two weeks, and will be informed about the location for the meeting and how to get there by the end of May.
Those who are interested in presenting in the lightning round (see program) are asked to send an extended abstract (800-1000 words, containing the authors and contact information of the presenting author) by March 5, 2021 to Julian Sagebiel (sagebiel@tu-berlin.de) or Jürgen Meyerhoff (juergen.meyerhoff@tu-berlin.de). Submitted contributions should preferably focus on non-econometric topics relevant for assessing or improving the validity of stated preference environmental valuation using choice modelling. (Note – submitted papers can apply econometric methods to demonstrate results, but econometrics should not be the primary focus.) Contributions will be reviewed and presenters will be informed by the end of March whether their abstract has been accepted.
* Will be provided in or in front of the room where the workshop will take place.
