Abstract

This paper explores the influence of both cultural and socio-economic characteristics on the perception of complexity and cognitive load associated with stated choice (SC) experiments. Complexity is analysed in terms of five design dimensions which were systematically varied according to a macro experimental design. To study the influence of cross country differences on willingness to pay estimates, we combined datasets collected in Sydney, Santiago de Chile and Taichung city in Taiwan, all of them related to an equivalent route choice experiment. Several mixed logit models were specified and estimated; our results show that design dimensions do have an impact on the behavioural outputs of discrete choice models estimated on SC data. However, these influences seem to be data-specific, suggesting that the impact of design dimensions upon SC outcomes may be local and not necessarily transferable across different countries and cultures. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.