Seminar with Professor Iain Fraser

Date

Time

3:00pm - 4:30pm ACDT

Venue

University of Adelaide, Level 3 Boardroom, Nexus 10 Building, Adelaide, South Australia

Speakers

Iain Fraser is a Professor of Agri-Environmental Economics. He received his PhD from the University of Manchester in 1992. He has held academic positions in the UK at the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University and Imperial College. He also lectured in Australia for seven years at La Trobe University. His research interests cover various aspects of agricultural, environmental and resource economics.
Iain's current research interests cover various aspects of agricultural, environmental and resource economics. Examples include agri-environmental economics (the use of contracts, implications of climate change, farmer coordination), non-market valuation (Choice Experiments), the role of information in food consumption and applied econometrics. He has also conducted research on various aspects of biodiversity conservation, natural resource accounting, household waste management and the use of contracts in the Australian wine sector.

Description

In situations where the decision makers are aware of their preferences, they may be able to form a probability of the choices they would make in the context of a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE). If so, the direct elicitation of those probabilities would be more informative than observing what amounts to the outcome of a Bernoulli trial based on those probabilities. However, as we explain, decision makers may have uncertainty about these probabilities. We design and implement alternative elicitations methods for choices between novel food products that recognises this potential uncertainty. This study explores two new formats for eliciting respondent preferences in DCEs: i) binomial; and ii) subjective logic. These are compared to the standard DCE elicitation method to assess statistical performance as well as additional insights into the choice making decision. We use data from an online DCE conducted to examine UK consumer willingness-to-pay (WTP) for dried apple. The estimation approach employed is Hierarchical Bayesian. Our findings show that respondents WTP estimates using the various elicitation methods are similar. However, the new elicitation approaches provide more information about heterogeneity of consumer choice as well as choice uncertainty.

This event is FREE for AARES members and non-members

For any enquiries, please contact Sophie Lountain