Reducing respondent burden, information processing effort, and incomprehensibility in stated-preference surveys: Principles and properties of the pairwise design strategy

The validity of stated-preference and choice models is strongly influenced by the ability of the respondents to capture and understand the experimental task, which in turn is a function of the complexity of the attribute profiles and the degree to which the respondents can relate to the choice options. Several measures on respondent burden, information processing effort, and incomprehensibility of stated-preference experiments are developed. The applicability of the measures is demonstrated in a comparison of the pairwise approach with traditional design strategies.