Using a choice experiment and birder preferences to guide bird‐conservation funding

Conservation of biodiversity, including birds, continues to challenge natural‐area managers. Stated‐preference methods (e.g., choice experiment [CE]) are increasingly used to provide data for valuation of natural ecosystems. We used a CE to calculate birders’ willingness to pay for different levels of bioecological attributes (threatened species, endemic species, and diversity) of birding sites with hypothetical entry fees. The CE was delivered at popular birding and avitourism sites in Australia and the United Kingdom. Latent‐class modeling results revealed heterogeneous preferences among birders and correspondingly variable willingness to pay. Four clear groups were apparent: quantity‐driven birders, special‐birds seekers, confused respondents, and price‐is‐no‐object birders. Quantity‐driven birders were attracted to sites that deliver high levels of diversity and endemic species for which they were willing to pay $135 and $66 to visit, respectively, above what they were willing to pay to visit a site with low levels of diversity and few endemic and threatened species . Special‐bird seekers valued threatened species and high levels of endemic species most (willingness to pay $45 and $46, respectively). Confused respondents’ preferences were difficult to determine, but they were the most sensitive to the hypothetical entry fees, unlike the price‐is‐no‐object birders, who were not at all sensitive to cost. Our findings demonstrate that birders are amenable to paying for their preferred birding experience. These payments could provide an alternative source of funding in some avitourism sites on both public and private land. Such alternative revenue streams should be explored and given full consideration in increasingly competitive conservation‐financing environments.     

Bridging the gap between laboratory experiments and naturally occurring markets: An inferred valuation method

Several recent studies have found important differences between behavior in the laboratory and the field. We explore two possible causes for the divergence: social concerns and unfamiliarity with the traded good. Consistent with our conceptual model, we find that people overstated their preferences for relatively familiar goods with normative attributes and understated their preferences for a relatively unfamiliar good with low normative motivations in the laboratory as compared to the field. We also find that for goods with a normative dimension, a new method we refer to as inferred valuation has the potential to narrow the lab–field gap. In some cases, willingness-to-pay obtained from a conventional valuation elicitation method is more than twice the value from the new inferred valuation approach.     

Trophy hunters’ willingness to pay for wildlife conservation and community benefits

In the face of fundamental land‐use changes, the potential for trophy hunting to contribute to conservation is increasingly recognized. Trophy hunting can, for example, provide economic incentives to protect wildlife populations and their habitat, but empirical studies on these relationships are few and tend to focus on the effects of benefit‐sharing schemes from an ex post perspective. We investigated the conditions under which trophy hunting could facilitate wildlife conservation in Ethiopia ex ante. We used a choice experiment approach to survey international trophy hunters’ (n = 224) preferences for trips to Ethiopia, here operationalized as trade‐offs between different attributes of a hunting package, as expressed through choices with an associated willingness to pay. Participants expressed strong preferences and, consequently, were willing to pay substantial premiums for hunting trips to areas with abundant nontarget wildlife where domestic livestock was absent and for arrangements that offered benefit sharing with local communities. For example, within the range of percentages considered in the survey, respondents were on average willing to pay an additional $3900 for every 10 percentage points of the revenue being given to local communities. By contrast, respondents were less supportive of hunting revenue being retained by governmental bodies: Willingness to pay decreased by $1900 for every 10 percentage points of the revenue given to government. Hunters’ preferences for such attributes of hunting trips differed depending on the degree to which they declared an interest in Ethiopian culture, nature conservation, or believed Ethiopia to be politically unstable. Overall, respondents thus expressly valued the outcomes of nature conservation activities—the presence of wildlife in hunting areas—and they were willing to pay for them. Our findings highlight the usefulness of insights from choice modeling for the design of wildlife management and conservation policies and suggest that trophy hunting in Ethiopia could generate substantially more financial support for conservation and be more in line with conservation objectives than is currently the case.     

Public Willingness to Pay for Recovering and Downlisting Threatened and Endangered Marine Species

Abstract: Nonmarket valuation research has produced economic value estimates for a variety of threatened, endangered, and rare species around the world. Although over 40 value estimates exist, it is often difficult to compare values from different studies due to variations in study design, implementation, and modeling specifications. We conducted a stated‐preference choice experiment to estimate the value of recovering or downlisting 8 threatened and endangered marine species in the United States: loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta), leatherback sea turtle (Dermochelys coriacea), North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), North Pacific right whale (Eubalaena japonica), upper Willamette River Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), Puget Sound Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), Hawaiian monk seals (Monachus schauinslandi), and smalltooth sawfish (Pristis pectinata). In May 2009, we surveyed a random sample of U.S. households. We collected data from 8476 households and estimated willingness to pay for recovering and downlisting the 8 species from these data. Respondents were willing to pay for recovering and downlisting threatened and endangered marine taxa. Willingness‐to‐pay values ranged from $40/household for recovering Puget Sound Chinook salmon to $73/household for recovering the North Pacific right whale. Statistical comparisons among willingness‐to‐pay values suggest that some taxa are more economically valuable than others, which suggests that the U.S. public's willingness to pay for recovery may vary by species.     

Valuing environmental amenities through inverse optimization: Theory and case study

Amenity values of private forests are implicit but play a critical role in decision and policy making. This study presents an innovative valuation approach integrating techniques of operations research and economic theory of pricing environmental goods. A forest planning problem was inversed through altering its reward function of timber values so that the observed harvesting behavior became optimal. The discrepancy between the original and new rewards uncovered amenities values which were linked to forest attributes via hedonic models. This method was applied to a case study of the U.S. southern pine region. Depending on forest conditions, total economic values of amenities varied from zero to just under one thousand dollar per ha. At a discount rate of 3%, a typically managed forest generated on average $243 ha⁻¹ of amenities values per annum, more than twice of harvested timber values. Structural diversity and density of large pine trees were the key determinants to preserving forests for environmental amenities.     

Valuing non-market benefits derived from allotments in southeast England: A contingent valuation study

The English derive a wide range of values from allotments, but nearly 35% of allotments have disappeared in the last 20 years. The real value of allotments has probably been underestimated. The contingent valuation method (CVM) was used to give a monetary value to benefits derived from allotments by allotment holders and local residents. The study was conducted in southeast England (Wye and Ashford, Kent and Greater London). A postal survey with open-ended questions was filled in by 124 allotment holders and 74 residents. Respondents were asked to express their maximum willingness to pay for allotments (WTP) and the minimum willingness to accept (WTA) compensation for loss of allotments. The mean annual WTP for keeping allotments of allotment holders were £78.93, £35.64 and £79.43, and for local residents were £41.66, £46.14 and £283.57, in Wye, Ashford and London, respectively. The allotment holders' WTP was strategically more than WTA compensation and they were only willing to pay rent for using allotments, not for retaining them.     

Values and willingness-to-pay for sustainability-certified mobile phones

ABSTRACT

This study investigated whether endorsement of personal values is associated with willingness to pay more for mobile phones with an environmental or social sustainability label. Participants were students in Sweden, Norway and Germany. A self-report inventory was used to measure willingness to pay and the importance attached to values of Schwartz’s circular model. In Sweden and Norway, participants were willing to pay, on average, 18% extra for a mobile phone with labels for environmental or social sustainability. In Germany, the corresponding share was 12%. To strive for self-enhancement values, that is, social status and prestige, as well as control and dominance over people and resources, was associated with a lower willingness to pay for mobile phones with labels for environmental or social sustainability in all three countries. Furthermore, women were willing to pay more than men for mobile phones with both kinds of sustainability labels. In Sweden and Norway, participants were, on average, willing to pay more for a mobile phone with a label for social sustainability compared to a mobile phone with a label for environmental sustainability.     

Sequencing and Valuing Public Goods

This paper establishes several propositions concerning the importance of context in valuing public goods. It first provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the value of a public good to be independent of context. Utility-constant valuation sequences are considered where public goods are systematically made available or taken away. For the case of strict Hicksian substitutes, willingness to pay for an increase in one of the public goods is strictly decreasing the farther out in a sequence it is valued. For the destruction of public goods the reverse is true for willingness to accept compensation. Sequencing has opposite implications for the assessment of the benefits of providing public goods than for the assessment of the damage from destroying them.     

An experiment on the economic value of visibility

This paper reports on the development and application of an iterative bidding technique to examine proposed visibility reductions in the Four Corners Region of the southwest United States. The iterative bidding technique is a method to elicit honest bids for “goods” not priced in formal markets. Four issues associated with direct revelation of preferences for environmental goods are explored: (1) the establishment of linkages between the physical parameters of visibility and representation of the “good” called visibility to individuals for valuation purposes; (2) a systematic test for both observed and induced biases associated with the interative bidding technique; (3) replication of the results of previous experiments; and (4) reporting of empirical divergences between compensating and equivalent surplus measures of consumer surplus.     

Do Contingent Valuation Estimates Pass a “Scope” Test? A Meta-analysis

This paper considers the scope test proposed to judge the internal consistency of contingent valuation estimates. The test is shown to be quite sensitive to the maintained hypotheses required to derive fairly precise expectations for the properties of WTP functions, and, therefore, a different approach may be needed in gauging the reliability of CV. This paper describes an approach that relies on a weight-of-the-evidence criterion and uses meta-analysis to develop a systematic appraisal of what the economic values of changes in amenity resources are. The approach is illustrated for the case of estimating people's willingness to pay for improving (or maintaining) visibility at the national parks.     

Die Rolle von Kommunikation in der Umweltbewertung

Goal and Scope

Planning projects concerning the environment often provoke problems due to a lack of transparency of the applied scales and the appropriate evaluation methods. This paper therefore examines the general structure of all valuation processes before describing the character of the economic evaluation method in detail. From this point of view, requirements on planning processes are coming out which are to be achieved if their duty — the provision of public goods — is to be carried out efficiently.

Features

It will be shown that from an economist’s perspective a planning procedure acts as a surrogate of the market in coordinating individual’s preferences. The reasons for the inefficient level of the provision of environmental goods by private producers are their main characteristics: non-rivality and non-excludability; therefore public goods do not possess prices. Thus environmental goods have to be produced by cooperation and planning processes have to guarantee this. The main character of planning procedures is be seen in communication processes which is documented by a narrative study.

Results and Conclusions

Planning projects concerning the environment are strongly contingent on communication processes. Thus, they are also controllable by communication. The interdisciplinary research in communications shows that cooperative behaviour which is required for planning projects that should provide public goods can be benefited by applicative communication technologies. In this juncture (social) norms more and more emerge to act an important part in conveying cooperative behaviour. Especially so called ‘Sozialtechniken’ seem to be able to activate such norms.

Outlook

From the economist’s point of view planning projects concerning the environment mostly desiderate two things: Firstly, the procedures and methods which are applied to evaluate the regarding environmental goods in many cases suffer from transparency. Secondly, individual’s preferences predominant by the local population and accordingly by the directly involved parties are mostly not acquired adequately to achieve an efficient allocation of environmental goods. Applying more communication technologies to solve these two problems in the future both an increase of efficiency and an increase of the acceptability of such planning projects can be expected.     

Social networks and non-market valuations

This paper considers the role of social networks in the non-market valuation of public goods. In the model individuals derive utility both from their own direct enjoyment of the public good and from the enjoyment of those in their network. We find that network structure almost always matters, both for utility and for valuation. The network increases aggregate valuation when it assigns higher importance, that is, stronger connections, to individuals with higher private values for the public good. The model provides a theoretical foundation for the idea of opinion leaders who have disproportionate influence over their communities. Specifically, opinion leaders are individuals assigned high importance by the network, and projects favored by opinion leaders tend to be favored by the network as a whole. The model can also guide future empirical studies by enabling a more structural approach to non-market valuation in a socially connected group.     

The Case for Diminishing Marginal Existence Values

This study addresses the debate over sensitivity of existence values measured by contingent valuation to scope tests. We reconcile much of the debate within one theoretical model. If marginal WTP for existence goods is diminishing, then a study that tested for sensitivity to scope over a range for which marginal WTP is high would be more likely to detect sensitivity to scope than a study that focused on a range for which marginal WTP is much lower. An empirical model demonstrates this point for existence value of remote wilderness parks. These results have significant implications for future contingent valuation work.     

Semi-nonparametric Distribution-Free Dichotomous Choice Contingent Valuation

We apply a semi-nonparametric distribution-free estimator for binary discrete response data to the estimation of a dichotomous choice contingent valuation model. Using this estimator, mean and median compensating and equivalent variation can be consistently estimated without making nontheoretically motivated assumptions on consumer' preferences. The approach is illustrated using a contingent valuation survey of willingness to pay for reduction of risk of premature death due to exposure to hazardous waste. We find that a conventional parametric estimator and the proposed estimator give similar estimates of unconditional WTP, but that conditional on explanatory variables the estimates are quite different.     

Willingness to pay to protect cold water corals

There is increasing pressure to use currently untapped resources in the deep sea, raising questions regarding ecosystem service trade-offs in these often unknown areas. We assessed the trade-offs between protection of cold-water coral reefs and economic activities, such as fisheries and petroleum extraction, through a survey of a representative sample of the populations of Norway and Ireland. Choice-experiment surveys were conducted in workshop settings and through the internet. Both survey approaches provided some similar results, such as preferences for protection. Our cross-country comparison showed the general public in Norway and Ireland was willing, despite possible conflict with extractive and consumptive economic activities in the deep sea, to protect cold-water corals as habitat for fish. On average, people were willing to pay NKr 341 and NKr 424 for a small and large increase in protected areas respectively, and NKr 880 if the area is important habitat for fish, all else held equal. However, there was large variation across individuals and countries. Norwegian respondents valued pure existence of cold-water corals more than the Irish respondents, and the latter were less willing to trade off industrial activities than the former. Nonetheless, the findings support conservation of cold-water corals and more generally of ocean environments that provide habitat for fish, which the current deep sea governance systems are not adequately designed or sufficiently well-structured to secure.     

Quantifying Preferences for the Natural World Using Monetary and Nonmonetary Assessments of Value

Given that funds for biodiversity conservation are limited, there is a need to understand people's preferences for its different components. To date, such preferences have largely been measured in monetary terms. However, how people value biodiversity may differ from economic theory, and there is little consensus over whether monetary metrics are always appropriate or the degree to which other methods offer alternative and complementary perspectives on value. We used a choice experiment to compare monetary amounts recreational visitors to urban green spaces were willing to pay for biodiversity enhancement (increases in species richness for birds, plants, and aquatic macroinvertebrates) with self‐reported psychological gains in well‐being derived from visiting the same sites. Willingness‐to‐pay (WTP) estimates were significant and positive, and respondents reported high gains in well‐being across 3 axes derived from environmental psychology theories (reflection, attachment, continuity with past). The 2 metrics were broadly congruent. Participants with above‐median self‐reported well‐being scores were willing to pay significantly higher amounts for enhancing species richness than those with below‐median scores, regardless of taxon. The socio‐economic and demographic background of participants played little role in determining either their well‐being or the probability of choosing a paying option within the choice experiment. Site‐level environmental characteristics were only somewhat related to WTP, but showed strong associations with self‐reported well‐being. Both approaches are likely to reflect a combination of the environmental properties of a site and unobserved individual preference heterogeneity for the natural world. Our results suggest that either metric will deliver mutually consistent results in an assessment of environmental preferences, although which approach is preferable depends on why one wishes to measure values for the natural world. Preferencias de Cuantificación para el Mundo Natural Usando Estudios de Valor Monetario y No Monetario.     

Interpreting measures of economic loss: Evidence from contingent valuation and experimental studies

From the standpoint of conventional welfare theory, it is surprising that responses to contingent valuation studies of environmental goods have shown a consistent difference between willingness to pay and compensation demanded measures of economic loss. This paper examines these results in light of four reasons most often given as grounds for their dismissal. New experimental evidence supports an interpretation of the observed disparity in payment-and compensation-based measures as both real and psychologically meaningful. An alternative conceptual framework, suggested by prospect theory, is outlined and its relevance for economic assessments of potential environmental change is discussed briefly.     

Living with living systems: The co-evolution of values and valuation

This article explores features of the environmental valuation process through a co-evolutionary approach. Based on established works concerning complexity, living systems, and social, economic, evolutionary and hierarchy theories, it is argued that a special form of recursive co-evolution takes place between articulated values and methods of value articulation, within the environmental valuation system. It is proposed that this co-evolutionary approach provides new insights into (1) the process of environmental preference formation and (2) the phenomenon of value incommensurability. Finally, it is suggested that this approach also reveals that monetary unit-based environmental valuation methods are counter-productive to their own purpose of 'taking the economic worth of un-priced environmental goods and service into account.' This constitutes a new critique of monetary valuation, which is not addressed by a pragmatic defence of the practice. It is suggested that, in lieu of monetary valuation, taking the economic worth of these phenomena into account may be better served by focusing efforts on the design of new value articulation methods that are capable of expressing their priceless economic worth.     

The democratic provision of public and private goods from exhaustible resources

The problem of distributing exhaustible natural resources between consumption goods and environmental amenities through a voting process is analyzed. Assuming that individuals are endowed with an equal share of private goods, the method of majority decision does not always achieve a Pareto-optimal distribution. However, by means of side payments, the intensity of preferences is revealed. The voting procedure then leads to a Pareto-optimal solution which is more prone to environmental amenities than the simple method of majority decision.     

Personality and economic choices

There is substantial variation in individual preferences for public goods, yet much of that variation remains poorly understood. However, simple measures of personality can help to explain economic values and choices in a systematic way. In this paper, we examine the effects of personality on individual economic choices over public environmental goods. Based on three datasets from three separate stated preference studies, we use a hybrid choice econometric framework to examine the effects of personality on preferences for the status quo, changes in environmental quality, and costs of investing in environmental improvements. We find effects that are consistent across all datasets. Personality, a stable feature of an individual's character that is simple to measure, enriches explanations of why the demand for environmental goods varies across people, provides an indication of how different people are likely to react to the introduction of environmental policies, and explains substantial differences in Willingness to Pay.