Presentation on measuring agency through willingness to pay experiments

Akanksha Vardani (Research Advisor, Behavioural Insights Team UK) presented ‘Willingness to pay as a measure of agency: Implementation and Interpretation’ at the Food and Nutrition Policy (FNP) Brown Bag Seminar on October 29, 2025. The paper, co-authored with Aletheia Donald (World Bank) and Berber Kramer (IFPRI), examines the validity and interpretation of willingness to pay (WTP) experiments as measures of bargaining power within households.

Willingness to pay for control over income—typically assessed through lab-in-the-field experiments—has become an increasingly popular method for measuring bargaining power, with higher WTP values conventionally interpreted as indicating lower bargaining power. However, questions remain about both the practical feasibility of implementation and the validity of this interpretation.

As part of MAGNET, the authors designed a simple survey module to elicit WTP alongside participants' motivations for reporting positive, zero, or negative values, and implemented it among 498 women and 498 men in Rwanda in parallel with traditional lab-in-the-field elicitation. The study found that lab-based elicitation does not perform better than the quicker and cheaper survey-based measure. These findings were replicated with 866 women and 867 men in India.

Critically, respondents across the distribution of WTP values cited reasons that challenge the assumed monotonic relationship between WTP and bargaining power. Many participants with positive WTP attributed this to preferences for dignity or private insurance against future contingencies like divorce, rather than to fears of spousal appropriation. When the analysis conditioned on these reported motivations, correlations between WTP and bargaining power aligned with theoretical predictions. 

A key takeaway is that understanding why individuals are willing to pay for control—rather than simply observing that they are—is essential for accurately measuring agency and bargaining power within households. The presentation was followed by an open discussion.