The Effects of Order Bias on Price Elasticity Measurement

In a recent survey, FGI measured the potential price impact of including recycled content in a paper product that had not previously been available with this content.  The intent was to measure the degree to which there was a change in respondents’ expectations of price based on this alternative content.

Traditionally, surveys are designed to present price options on a basic scale, without methodological regard to the order in which the price deltas are presented to the respondents.  In this survey, a random half of the respondents were presented the pricing variation choices from low-to-high (i.e. 30% less to 30% more), and the other half were presented the price variations in the opposite order (30% more to 30% less).