Information and Learning in Stated-Preference Studies

We use experimental variation to influence how people learn a given amount of objective, scientific information about an unfamiliar public good. We then estimate the impact of treatment on valuations for that good in a stated preference survey. Our main treatment, a pre-survey multiple choice quiz about objective public good attributes, increased learning rates by over 60%. We find that despite increasing learning and retention rates, treatment had no statistically significant impact on mean nor variance of the distribution of valuations. We show with a very simple theoretical model this result is consistent with a model of confirmatory bias used by agents in stated preference surveys and inconsistent with other models of preference formation.