Attention and preference measurement

This dissertation contains two essays examining the role of attention and information processing in stated choices under choice-based preference measurement tasks. While choice experiments have long been used in marketing as a way to measure consumer preferences, full rationality of consumers is always assumed, meaning consumers are able to process all the choice relevant information before making a decision. Moreover, conditioned on the premise that consumers process all the choice-relevant information, incentive-alignment mechanism introduced in choice experiments are considered the gold standard for inducing consumers to choose as they would in real-life situations. However, if consumers are boundedly rational and processing information is costly, we expect consumers to maximize not only the utility derived from the option they choose but also the utility derived from the process. Therefore, given a certain incentive structure, the amount of information processed by consumers is endogenized by individual preference toward the focal product in a choice experiment. Furthermore, research has shown that varying incentives in experiments might also result in changes in attention, whi