RT Carson is a big, if not the biggest name in the field of contingent valuation (CV). He doesn't publish much but each of his papers seemed to push the field one step further. Of course I had to hear what he got to say when he was invited to ANU for a lecture.
His presentation was titled "Incentive and informational properties of preference questions", the same as a paper he co-authored with T Groves last year in the Journal of Environmental & Resource Economics. That paper was full of jargon and I think I can understand half of it (I did a meta-analysis on contingent valuation studies for my PhD dissertation) and after today's talk I think I got another 25% :)
Here is my interpretation in plain English: the way CV questions framed affects survey results. "Ask a hypothetical questions and you get a hypothetical answer". So in designing a survey we researchers should make the questions as realistic as possible ("Consequential survey questions"). By realistic Carson meant the survey respondents had to be made to believe that their answers would potentially influencing some policy making process. Only under such circumstances will the conventional economic rule of profit maximization hold.
Also according to Carson the Binary discrete choice format is the only way to achieve such a result.
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