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Online Survey Data Quality and Its Implication for Willingness‐to‐Pay: A Cross‐Country Comparison
Author(s) -
Gao Zhifeng,
House Lisa A.,
Xie Jing
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
canadian journal of agricultural economics/revue canadienne d'agroeconomie
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.505
H-Index - 37
eISSN - 1744-7976
pISSN - 0008-3976
DOI - 10.1111/cjag.12069
Subject(s) - popularity , quality (philosophy) , willingness to pay , survey data collection , data quality , preference , statistics , computer science , econometrics , psychology , marketing , social psychology , business , economics , metric (unit) , mathematics , philosophy , epistemology , microeconomics
Using online surveys to elicit consumer preference is gaining popularity because of several advantages offered by this method. Past research mainly focuses on the comparison between online surveys and other survey modes. Few have explored methods of using online survey tools to improve data quality for consumer willingness‐to‐pay (WTP) estimates. This article determines the impact of using a validation question (VQ) approach that asked survey respondents to select a particular answer on improving online survey data quality across six countries. Results show that survey data quality is a common problem in online surveys across countries and the severity of this problem differs significantly. Using VQs might detect the respondents who are less careful in answering survey questions, thus providing less reliable answers. The econometric models for respondents who correctly answer VQs (pass VQs) perform significantly better than the models for respondents who incorrectly answer VQs (fail VQs). The WTP estimates for respondents who pass and fail VQs differ significantly; and in general the WTP estimates for respondents passing VQs have smaller variances than those for all respondents and for respondents failing VQs.