Construction of Minimax Designs for the Trinomial Spike Model in Contingent Valuation Experiments

Abstract

This paper concerns design of contingent valuation experiments when interest is in knowing whether respondents have positive willingness to pay and, if so, if they are willing to pay a certain amount for a specified good. A trinomial spike model is used to model the response. Locally D-and c-optimal designs are derived and it is shown that any locally optimal design can be deduced from the locally optimal design for the case when one of the model parameters is standardized. It is demonstrated how information about the parameters, e.g., from pilot studies, can be used to construct minimax and maximin efficient designs, for which the best guaranteed value of the criterion function or the efficiency function is sought under the assumption that the parameter values are within certain regions. The proposed methodology is illustrated on an application where the value of the environmentally friendly production of clothes is evaluated.