Question

what are the various biases of conducting a contingent valuation experiment? Name and explain all the biases, along with explaining the steps recommended to be taken for treating the said biases.

Answer 1

Contingent valuation values informal care either in terms of the maximum monetary amount informal carers would be willing to pay for reducing caring activities, or the minimum monetary amount that they would be willing to accept for supplying extra informal care. It is a survey-based approach to putting an economic value on goods that are not ordinarily bought and sold in the marketplace. It is frequently used in benefit–cost analyses of environmental amenities ranging from clean water and wildness areas to health risks and outdoor recreation. Passive use values can be present if the person does not use or visit the environmental amenity. There has been a large ongoing debate with respect to the use of CV. Contingent valuation has been used to estimate the value of informal care in a few studies, for example, Gustavsson et al. (2010) estimated the willingness to pay for reductions in informal care need in Alzheimer's disease. Although contingent valuation questions might be relatively simple to ask, they might not be straightforward to answer as carers might not be used to thinking about monetary valuation of informal care time and, therefore, some respondents may be unwilling to value carer time in monetary terms. This might be especially true if the question is framed as if the care recipient might pay the carer. In an attempt to solving this problem van den Berg et al. (2005) suggested framing the question as if the government was going to compensate the carers, as sometimes happens via carer allowances.
Types of biases and their solution:
1) Confermation bias: In hiring, confirmation bias often plays a detrimental role at the very beginning of the process when you first review a resume and form an initial opinion of the candidate based on inconsequential attributes like their name, where they’re from, where they went to school and so forth.
Solution- While every interview will lend itself to a unique conversation based on the individual's background, it’s important to ask standardized, skills-based questions that provide each candidate with a fair chance to stand out.
2) Conformity bias: When your hiring team gets together to review a candidate’s application materials and conduct the interview, conformity bias can cause individuals to sway their opinion of a candidate to match the opinion of the majority. The problem is the majority is not always right, which may cause your team to miss out on an excellent candidate because individual opinions become muddled in a group setting.
Solution- Before you get your hiring team together to review a candidate, have them all write down and submit their individual opinions separate from one another immediately after the interview ends.
3) Gender bias: It’s no surprise that men are are all-too-often given preferential treatment over women in the workplace. But to put proof to the pudding, one study found that both men and women prefer male job candidates. So much so that, in general, a man is 1.5x more likely to be hired than a woman.
Solution- Conduct blind screenings of applications that exclude aspects of a candidate that may reveal their assumed gender, like name and interests. Set diversity hiring goals to ensure your company holds itself accountable to equitable hiring practices. And again, make sure to compare candidates based on skill and merit rather than traits that can cloud your judgement of them.
4) Affinity bias: When companies hire for ‘culture fit,’ they are likely falling prey to affinity bias. When hiring teams meet someone they like and who they know will get along with the team, it’s more often than not because that person shares similar interests, experiences and backgrounds, which is not helping your team grow and diversify.
Solution- Actively take note of the similarities you share with the candidate so that you can differentiate between attributes that may cloud your judgement and the concrete skills,
experiences and unique qualities that would contribute to your team as a ‘culture add’ rather than ‘culture fit.’
5) Attribution bias: While this may seem harmless, humans are quick to judge and falsely assume things about a person without knowing their full story. When hiring, attribution bias can cause hiring managers and recruiters to determine a candidate unfit for the job because of something unusual on their resume or unexpected behavior during the interview.
Solution- Rather than assume (because we all know what they say about assuming) a candidate is unfit for a job because they were late to the interview, ask them what happened — it could be totally innocent and unprecedented. If there is something on their resume or something they said during the interview that caused you to draw conclusions about the candidate,ask them further clarifying questions.