It is well known that some percentage of respondents participating in Stated Preference

surveys will not give responses which reflect their true preferences. One reason is protest

behaviour. If the distribution of protest responses is not independent of respondent

demographics, the elicitation method, the question format, etc., then simply expelling

protesters from surveys will lead to sample selection issues. Furthermore, WTP estimates

will not be comparable across surveys. This paper seeks to explore potential causes of

protest behaviour through a meta-study based on data from 10 different surveys. The

objective of the study is to examine the effect of respondent specific variables as well as

survey specific variables on protest behaviour. Our results suggest that some of the

differences in WTP typically observed between different demographic groups, different

elicitation formats and different question formats might actually be attributed to inherent

differences in the propensity to protest. Our results indicate that the propensity for

respondents to exhibit protest behaviour when asked a stated preference type valuation

question depends on a number of specific factors, respondent specific as well as survey

specific.