The Priced Survey Methodology: Theory

Abstract: In this paper, I introduce the Priced Survey Methodology (PSM), a tool designed to overcome the limitations of traditional survey methods in analyzing social preferences. The PSM's design draws inspiration from consumption choice experiments, as respondents fill out the same survey multiple times under different choice sets. I generalize Afriat's theorem and show that the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preferences is necessary and sufficient for the existence of a concave, continuous, and single-peaked utility function rationalizing answers to the PSM. This result has two major implications. First, it is possible to measure a respondent's ideal answer to a survey using only ordinal relations between possible answers. Second, the PSM captures aspects of social preferences often overlooked in standard surveys, such as the relative importance that respondents attribute to different survey questions. I deploy a PSM measuring altruistic preferences in a sample of online participants, recover respondents' single-peaked preferences, and draw several implications.