The value of familiarity: Effects of knowledge and objective signals on willingness to pay for a public good

We design and conduct a field experiment in which treated subjects receive a precise and objective signal regarding their knowledge about a public good before estimating their WTP for it. We find that the causal effect of objective signals about the accuracy of a subject׳s knowledge for a public good can dramatically affect their valuation for it: treatment caused a significant increase of $85–$129 in WTP for well-informed individuals. We find no such effect for less informed subjects. Our results imply that WTP estimates for public goods are not only a function of true information states of the respondents but beliefs about those information states.