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Contribution Details

Type Working Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Who likes it more? Using response times to elicit group preferences in surveys
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Carlos Alos-Ferrer
  • Michele Garagnani
Language
  • English
Institution University of Zurich
Series Name Working paper series / Department of Economics
Number 422
ISSN 1664-7041
Number of Pages 36
Date 2022
Abstract Text Surveys and opinion polls are essential instruments to elicit societal preferences and uncover differences between socioeconomic or demographic groups. However, survey data is noisy, and survey bias is ubiquitous, limiting the reliability and usefulness of standard analyses. We provide a new method that uncovers group preferences and unambiguously ranks the relative strength of preference between groups of agents, leveraging the information contained in response times. The method delivers a nonparametric criterion to determine whether a group (defined, e.g., by gender, age cohort, socioeconomic status, political orientation, etc.) prefers an option over its alternative, and whether it does so more strongly than another group, without any assumptions on the underlying noise. We demonstrate the practical value of this method by studying preferences over important socioeconomic topics in a representative sample of the U.K. population. We find that the new method often provides results when tests based on choice frequencies are inconclusive, and also identifies cases where tests are significant but inferences on preferences are unwarranted.
Other Identification Number merlin-id:23026
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Keywords Survey data, revealed preference, response times, stochastic choice