Disentangling impacts of payment and provision consequentiality and risk attitudes on stated preferences

Stated preference literature suggests that to be incentivised to reveal preferences truthfully in a survey, respondents need to believe that a response in favour of a policy project of providing a public good increases chances of actual provision of the good (policy consequentiality) and that the cost of conducing the policy project stated in a survey will be actually collected upon the policy implementation (payment consequentiality). We investigate the effects of the two aspects of consequentiality beliefs on stated preferences in a field survey concerning renewable energy development in Poland. Using a hybrid choice model to capture unobservable beliefs in consequentiality, we find that latent beliefs in policy consequentiality and in payment consequentiality affect stated preferences differently: respondents believing in policy consequentiality prefer the project implementation to the status quo more than those believing in payment consequentiality; respondents believing in payment consequentiality state significantly lower willingness to pay for the project than those believing in policy consequentiality. Respondents with no clear opinion on the degree of the survey’s consequentiality reveal substantially different preferences; they are much less interested in seeing the proposed project implemented. We also find that respondents’ risk attitudes do not impinge neither on their self-reported perceptions over the survey’s consequentiality nor on their preferences.