Experienced Participant Valuation Spillover
RCTClinical Trial
Repeated exposure to complex financial instruments across multiple seasons can influence consumer valuation and willingness to pay, differentiating veteran trial subjects from newly recruited market participants.
Picture this
Think of a town where half the residents tested a new brand of electric cars last year while the other half never saw one; first-time buyers might express higher curiosity and higher willingness to pay, whereas experienced drivers bid more conservatively based on real-world usage.
What the evidence says
New participants expressed a statistically significant higher willingness to pay for insurance policies (approx. Rs. 6–8 higher per policy) relative to returning multi-year study participants.
- Who was studied
- N = 1,978 total farmers (1,464 original 2009 study participants and 514 newly added subjects) in rural Andhra Pradesh, India.
- How
- OLS regression controlling for "New Participants" status during BDM willingness-to-pay elicitations across four policy designs.
What to do
Account for participant study fatigue and novelty bias when measuring willingness to pay for novel financial services across multi-year experimental panels.
From the source
"Column (4) adds controls for new participants, who express a higher average willingness to pay than individuals part of the original sample..."
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