Incentive-Aligned Methods

Research methods where respondents face real financial consequences for their stated preferences. The gold standard is the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism, where respondents state their maximum price and then must actually purchase at a randomly drawn price if it's at or below their stated WTP. Incentive-aligned methods produce accurate WTP estimates because over-bidding or under-bidding can't help the respondent — peer-reviewed pricing-research findings consistently show BDM-derived WTP clusters tightly around the true value, while hypothetical methods produce answers roughly twice as large with much wider variance. The problem: BDM is impractical in most B2B commercial settings. You can't ask an enterprise buyer to commit to purchasing software at a random price. SPP relies on transaction data instead — the market itself is the incentive-aligned mechanism. Every closed deal is a revealed-preference data point.