Norwood, F. BaileySilwal, Pratikshya2025-01-222025-01-222024-07https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14446/345830Understanding consumer preferences and accurately predicting their behavior are critical for effective marketing and product development. This dissertation explores three distinct yet interconnected areas to enhance this understanding. The first chapter examines consumers’ willingness to pay for potting mix containing Eastern Redcedar (ERC) biochar through an online survey. The study finds that limited information leads to a non-significant negative impact on willingness to pay (WTP), while presenting ERC biochar as environmentally friendly increases WTP by $0.618 per cubic foot of potting mix bag. Providing detailed environmental benefits of ERC biochar further increases WTP by $1.63 and $2.42 for mixes with 10% and 20% ERC biochar, respectively. These findings suggest that there is a substantial market potential of potting mix containing biochar. The second chapter explores investigates whether differences in responses between direct and indirect questioning are due to social desirability bias or perceived self-other differences. The study shows that while social desirability bias affects responses to normative attributes, non-normative attributes reflect perceived self-other differences. These results challenge the assumption that indirect questioning solely mitigates social desirability bias, emphasizing the need for researchers to carefully consider its implications for accurate behavioral predictions and reducing survey biases. The third chapter addresses challenges in online surveys by introducing a dialectic approach that combines assembling and disassembling approaches. he assembling approach starts with individual attribute values to estimate attribute-bundles, while disassembling infers individual values from attribute-bundles. Prediction accuracy, measured by mean squared error (MSE) in a holdout sample, shows that the dialectic approach outperforms the other two, providing better predictive accuracy and utility parameters at the individual level. This approach also effectively identifies inattentive respondents, highlighting its practical advantages in survey research.application/pdfCopyright is held by the author who has granted the Oklahoma State University Library the non-exclusive right to share this material in its institutional repository. Contact Digital Library Services at lib-dls@okstate.edu or 405-744-9161 for the permission policy on the use, reproduction or distribution of this material.Dissertation