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Abstract
This paper investigates the effect of physical position on ‘best’ and ‘worst’ choices in the bestworst
scaling technique. Although the best-worst scaling technique has been used widely in
many fields, the phenomenon of consumers’ adoption of processing strategies while making
choices has been largely overlooked. We examine this issue in the context of consumers’ perception
of trust in institutions to provide information about a new food technology, namely
nanotechnology, and its use in food processing. Our results show that around half of the consumers
used position as a schematic cue when making choices. We find the position bias is
particularly strong when consumers chose their most trustworthy institution compared to their
least trustworthy institution. In light of our findings, we recommend researchers in the field to
be aware of the possibility of position bias when designing best-worst scaling surveys. We also
encourage researchers who have already collected best-worst data to investigate whether their
data shows such heuristics.