Measures of households' past behavior, their expectations with respect to future events and contingencies, and their intentions
with respect to future behavior are frequently collected using household surveys. These questions are conceptually difficult.
Answering them requires elaborate cognitive and social processes, and often respondents report only their “best” guesses and/or
estimates, using more or less sophisticated heuristics. A large body of literature in psychology and survey research shows
that as a result, responses to such questions may be severely biased. In this paper, (1) we describe some of the problems
that are typically encountered, (2) provide some empirical illustrations of these biases, and (3) develop a framework for
conceptualizing survey response behavior and for integrating structural models of response behavior into the statistical analysis
of the underlying economic behavior.
Keywords consumer surveys - survey response error - hypothetical choice - applied econometrics