The average price bias choice quasi-experiment is designed to elicit consumers’ perceptions about different pricing schemes. The experiment aims to correlate the findings with participants’ characteristics, potential behavioural biases and the participants’ financial and environmental literacy levels.

The experiment consists of five discrete key sections: 1) a section about participant’s demographic data, 2) a small set of questions related to behavioural biases, 3) a set of questions related to financial literacy, 4) a section with questions related to environmental literacy and 5) the choice experiment about price perceptions.

Section 5 presents a hypothetical scenario about the participant’s yearly energy consumption and several pricing tariff options. The participant has to choose a pricing tariff they think is the most cost-effective. There are six (1-6) broader cases, each including four subcategories (a-d). The further the case is from the beginning, the more complicated it is.

The implementation of the experiment is as follows:

Step 1. The participant first receives the following message: “Assuming that your yearly energy consumption is exactly 6,000 kWh, which one of the following tariffs would you choose as the most cost-effective?”

Step 2. Each participant will be asked to participate in only 2 cases (all subcategories of each case are included). A case will be randomly chosen from cases 1-3 (simple case) and a second random choice will be made from cases 4-6 (complex case). Thus, all participants will answer a simple and a complicated set of questions.

Step 3. The participant receives the first set of choices.

If the participant answers correctly, he receives the next subcategory’s choice set. If he answers false, he gets the next set of choices within the same subcategory. Thus, as soon the participant answers correctly, he skips the following set of choices and moves to the next subcategory. For a participant answering correctly, this will be a short survey. However, for someone answering wrong, the survey will last longer.

More information can be found on the public deliverables of the EVIDENT project https://evident-h2020.eu/deliverables/. More specifically, the experiment’s theoretical framework and motivation are described in deliverable D1.2 Assessing behavioural biases and financial literacy, in section 5 while the final design is reported in D3.2 Implementation of preparatory actions for RCT, surveys and serious game.

Cite as: Pragidis, Ioannis, & Karypidis, Paris-Alexandros. (2023). EVIDENT H2020 – Average Price Bias Dataset (0.1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7825632