Relaxing the No Liars Assumption in List Experiment Analyses

The analysis of list experiments depends on two assumptions, known as “no design effect” and “no liars”. The no liars assumption is strong and may fail in many list experiments. I relax the no liars assumption in this paper, and develop a method to provide bounds for the prevalence of sensitive behaviors or attitudes under a weaker behavioral assumption about respondents’ truthfulness toward the sensitive item. I apply the method to a list experiment on the anti-immigration attitudes of California residents and on a broad set of existing list experiment datasets. The prevalence of different items and the correlation structure among items on the list jointly determine the width of the bound estimates. In particular, the bounds tend to be narrower when the list consists of items of the same category, such as multiple groups or organizations, different corporate activities, and various considerations for politician decision-making. My paper illustrates when the full power of the no liars assumption is most needed to pin down the prevalence of the sensitive behavior or attitude, and facilitates estimation of the prevalence robust to violations of the no liars assumption for many list experiment applications.