What are the consequences of ignoring attributes in choice experiments? An application to ecosystem service values

This paper investigates the sensitivity of choice experiment values for ecosystem services to " attribute non-attendance ". We consider three cases of attendance, namely that people may always, sometimes or never pay attention to a given attribute in making their choices. This allows a series of models to be estimated which address the following questions: To what extent do respondents attend to attributes in choice experiments? What is the impact of alternative strategies for dealing with attribute non-attendance? Can respondents self-report non-attendance? Do respondents partially attend to attributes, and what are the implications of this for willingness to pay estimates? Our results show that allowing for the instance of " sometimes attending " to attributes in making choices offers advantages over methods employed thus far in the literature.