Revisiting Cheap Talk with New Evidence from a Field Experiment

Abstract

We assess the reduction of hypothetical bias in consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for products by applying a generic, short, and neutral cheap talk script in a retail setting. Using an open-ended elicitation mechanism with non-hypothetical, hypothetical, and hypothetical with cheap talk treatments, our results indicate that the hypothetical WTP values are higher than the nonhypothetical values, but the hypothetical with cheap talk values are not significantly different from non-hypothetical estimates.