real economic commitment. In the literature, this is known as the hypothetical bias (see, for example, Alfnes et al., 2006 ). Previous studies also show that there is significant hypothetical bias when consumers' WTP is elicited using pictures instead
participants to tradeoff certain product attributes for others, thus helping limit sample bias ( Mason et al., 2008 ). In turn, respondent preferences for different product options are broken down to determine the respondents' inferred utility function and
, hypothetical responses may suffer from “hypothetical bias,” i.e., overstating consumer WTP compared with revealed choices of consumers with actual purchases in non-hypothetical situations ( Blumenschein et al., 2008 ; Cummings et al., 1995 ; Harrison, 2006
group could contact them). Their results indicate the WTP associated with the hypothetical setting is likely to be larger than the value obtained from the WTP in the real setting. As such, the payment setting of the current study may have biased WTP
for alternative designs that incorporate any form of prairie garden compared with a conventional lawn ( Helfand et al., 2006 ). It has been noted, that due to the hypothetical bias of survey-based methods, willingness to pay elicited from hypothetical
shoppers and therefore are generally less biased than stated (hypothetical) preference data, which are commonly used in consumer studies ( List and Gallet, 2001 ; Louviere et al., 2000 ). We analyzed the data using random parameter logit models for the 676
study is from four states (Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, and Texas), so it is not necessarily representative of the entire U.S. population. Also, this study is a hypothetical survey without the exchange of money and goods, which might lead to some bias
water efficiency in plant production ( Yue et al., 2015 ), and quality attributes in ‘Honeycrisp’ apples ( Gallardo et al., 2015 ). Although experimental auctions can be hypothetical, hypothetical auctions can sometimes suffer from hypothetical bias
because of incomplete answers, and not used in the analysis. The literature ( List and Gallet, 2001 ; Murphy et al., 2005 ) shows there is some hypothetical bias by using pictures instead of real products. Consumers often bid more in auctions using
format, there is a potential for bias associated the hypothetical nature of the response format ( Murphy et al., 2005 ). In general non-hypothetical techniques (e.g., experimental auctions) have been used to offset any potential hypothetical biases