Strategic Bias in Willingness to Pay Studies for Traditional Food Products: Anchoring Evidence on Repeated Experiments

We design a Willingness to Pay (WTP) study, where consumers’ preferences are plausibly affected by unobserved decisions and trial experiences. While WTP studies conducted under experimental settings might reduce hypothetical bias, it is unclear how strategic collusion and consumers’ limited exposure to products can bias estimates if these studies are conducted under incentivized settings in developing countries context. Our approach uses repeated experimentation where subjects are randomized twice on treatments. The repeated experimentation approach identifies preference consistency and accounts for dynamic convergences of consumers’ preferences, as acceptance likely varies with exposure to product attributes over time. Similarly, the econometric specification relies on longitudinal variation in treatments, which allows subjects’ characteristics and setting to have little influence on WTP estimates. These experimental designs evaluate consumers’ preference for cakes from Traditional Food Products (TFP), High-Quality Cassava Flour, and wheat flour mixtures in Nigeria. When analyzed separately and combined in panels, we find a time-consistent, insignificant difference in consumers’ preference and WTP for all cake categories. Intensifying research into cassava hybrids and processing techniques that enhance favorable attributes associated with HQCF could improve the acceptance of TFP in the region.