Dataset and protocols on the applicability of the BDM mechanism in product evaluation

Understanding how to best elicit consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for goods in an incentive-aligned way is one of the cornerstones in marketing planning decisions and consumer welfare theory. This article provides a dataset from an experiment with n = 107 consumers that measured the WTP for a set of eight real consumer goods by means of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism, entailing a facultative resell option. This procedure allows for testing the empirical incentive-compatibility of the BDM mechanism. Despite early evidence on lottery choices or fictitious goods, the empirical incentive-compatibility of the BDM mechanism in case of real consumer goods remains an under-researched topic. For the first time, we provide a dataset on consumers' WTP statements in such a paradigm. More precisely, this article provides experimental protocols, manipulation-check questions, full raw datasets, summary statistics, and model properties related to the research article entitled “On the applicability of the BDM mechanism in product evaluation” [Lichters et al., 2019]. The raw dataset allows for an independent analysis of consumers’ bidding behavior for multiple consumer goods. Thus, future researchers might use our dataset in a meta-analytic fashion for their own research on WTP elicitation.