Citizens’ choice of daycare provider: A conjoint experiment

Abstract

In modern welfare states, citizens’ choice of service providers is consequential for both service quality and the design of public services. Politicians and other central decision makers have a substantial interest in understanding how different factors affect citizens’ choice of service and how citizens make trade-offs between these factors. Using a conjoint experiment on a representative sample of Danish citizens, we study the importance of different organizational factors in the choice of daycare provider. Our results show that all included factors have meaningful effects on the propensity to choose a given provider. However, information about public vs. private ownership does not seem to have an impact on service choice. Additionally, we study whether having a high proportion of staff with pedagogical education can offset the negative impact of a poor staff to child ratio – this turns out not to be the case.