Respondent Experience and Contingent Valuation of Environmental Goods

Respondent experience (i.e., a respondent's information set) has long been suspected to influence contingent valuation estimates of environmental values. We assess the influence of experience by explicitly modeling the relationship between respondent experience and both fitted individual resource values and the conditional variance of these estimated values. Using three different joint specifications for experience and WTP—normal/censored-normal, Poisson/censored-normal, and zero-inflated Poisson/censored-normal—we find discrete jumps in resource values as experience increases from zero and that more-experienced respondents have smaller conditional variances. Simulation of arbitrary levels of experience allows standardization of the amount of information when developing welfare estimates.