Valuing risk reductions: Testing for range biases in payment card and random card sorting methods

Ongoing concerns with regard to the appropriate approach to elicitation of willingness-to-pay responses in contingent valuation studies have led to the development of a number of alternative techniques. One of the most recent, and on the surface, most promising of these is the random card sorting approach (RCS) which has been used for policy purposes to value risk reductions. This paper provides the first formal test of this procedure, comparing it against the widely used payment card (PC) format from which it is developed and whose recognised problems, such as range bias, it claims to address. However, the findings suggest that the RCS procedure is no less vulnerable to range bias than the PC method for eliciting both monetary values of health risk reductions and non-monetary estimates of death rates. Conclusions for future research initiatives are drawn.