Speaker
Description
There is growing concern about the validity and transparency of research results in Economics and other social sciences. While development economists have quickly adopted the idea of pre-registration for randomized controlled trials to address one part of the problem, the validity and credibility of stated preferences methods remain contested. Critics claim that stated preferences studies fail to provide realistic welfare estimates for cost benefit analysis and litigation. In this article, we critically appraise arguments in favour of pre-registration in Environmental Economics as a means to increase validity and credibility of welfare estimates elicited from stated preferences studies. We argue that pre-registration can safeguard against political influence; non-standard statistical tests or features of a study design can be justified ex-ante; pre-registration may serve as a disciplining tool to limit researcher degrees of freedom in the application of Discrete Choice Experiments, an stated preferences method which has seen a rapid increase in available econometric modelling options. In a continuation of these arguments, we evaluate features of pre-registration platforms to explore avenues of implementing pre-registration for stated preferences studies in Environmental Economics. Tying best practice guidelines in stated preferences research to pre-registration can enhance the validity and quality of research results and facilitate a much needed shift towards the integration and meta-analysis of multiple studies. We conclude that scholarly associations in Environmental Economics should play an active role in lobbying for pre-registration platforms that account for the specific needs of stated preferences research.
| Keywords | Transparency; pre-analysis plan; registered report; Discrete Choice Experiment; Contingent Valuation; Open Science |
|---|---|
| Status of your work | First results |
| Early Career Researcher Award | No, the paper is not eligible |
