Learning and Fatigue during Choice Experiments: a Comparison of Online and Mail Survey Modes

This study investigates the effect of survey mode on respondent learning and fatigue during repeated choice experiments. Stated preference data are obtained from an experiment concerning high-speed Internet service conducted on samples of mail respondents and online respondents. We identify and estimate aspects of the error components for different subsets of the choice questions, for both mail and online respondents. Results show mail respondents answer questions consistently throughout a series of choice experiments, but the quality of the online respondents’ answers declines. Therefore, while the online survey provides lower survey administration costs and reduced time between implementation and data analysis, such benefits come at the cost of less precise responses. Copyright  2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.