Impact of Purchase Intentions on Full and Partial Bids in BDM Auctions: Willingness-to-pay for Organic and Local Blueberries

We conduct a series of Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) auctions to elicit consumers' willingness-to-pay (WTP) for organic and local blueberries. Participants' intentions to purchase the auction product were collected to determine how purchase intentions for the auction products affect their partial bids (WTP for an additional attribute) as well as full bids (WTP for the auction product). The results suggest, as expected, that full bids from participants with purchase intention for the auction product are significantly higher than those from participants without purchase intention. However, the partial bids, which are inferred from the full bids, for organic and local attributes are consistent across participants with different purchase intentions. Therefore, if the focus of a BDM auction is consumers' WTP for product attributes, purchase intentions may not be an important influence on the value.