ISSN 2280-6180 (print) © Firenze University Press 
ISSN 2280-6172 (online) www.fupress.com/bae

DOI: 10.13128/bae-10443
Bio-based and Applied Economics 9(3): 223, 2020

Editorial

Eliciting preferences using stated choice experiments

Mara Thiene1, Jürgen Meyerhoff2

1 University of Padova, Padova
2 Technische Universität, Berlin

Stated choice experiments are nowadays widely used in different fields ranging from 
marketing and transport economics to health and environmental economics. They are a 
survey-based preference assessment technique that presents respondents with mutually 
exclusive alternatives described by attributes and their levels and asks them to choose the 
most preferred of those alternatives. Subsequently, the choices recorded enable estimates 
of the trade-offs among attribute levels respondents are willing to make, giving insights 
into their preferences. If one of the attributes is a cost variable, marginal willingness to 
pay estimates can be calculated, representing peoples’ preferences for different attributes 
on the same monetary unit. Due to the comprehensive information choice experiments 
can provide such as marginal and non-marginal welfare measures, they have recently 
become a favored method to evaluate individual preferences. However, stated choice 
experiments are by no means a method that can be employed by simply following stand-
ard recipes from a cookbook. Understanding participants responses to the designed choice 
tasks presented in surveys and their adequate analysis still requires further research to 
achieve validity and reliability of the requested results such as welfare estimates. 

This special issue wants to contribute to the development of choice experiments by 
presenting a number of selected papers that present results from methodological investi-
gations as well as from policy-oriented applications of choice experiments in the area of 
environmental and agricultural economics. The authors are mainly members of a group 
of academics who have met regularly over the last decade as members of the ENVECHO 
network, which is a scientific network of researchers using discrete choice modelling in 
the field of environmental valuation (www.envecho.com).

We wish to thank all authors and reviewers and, of course, the publisher for giving 
us the opportunity to publish this special issue in the journal Bio-based and Applied Eco-
nomics.


	Investigating determinants of choice and predicting market shares of renewable-based heating systems under alternative policy scenarios
	Cristiano Franceschinis, Mara Thiene
	Multi-country stated preferences choice analysis for fresh tomatoes
	Maria De Salvo1,*, Riccardo Scarpa2,3,4, Roberta Capitello2, Diego Begalli2
	“Not my cup of coffee”. Farmers’ preferences for coffee variety traits. Lessons for crop breeding in the age of climate change
	Abrha Megos Meressa, Ståle Navrud*
	Does the place of residence affect land use preferences? Evidence from a choice experiment in Germany
	Julian Sagebiel1,*, Klaus Glenk2, Jürgen Meyerhoff3
	The use of latent variable models in policy: A road fraught with peril?
	Danny Campbell*, Erlend Dancke Sandorf