Estimating Willingness to Pay for Alpine Pastures: A Discrete Choice Experiment Accounting for Attribute Non-Attendance (original) (raw)
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Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2018
Alpine livestock farms consist of pastures, buildings, people and animals, and are a key element for the economy in the Alps. Pastures and huts are often owned by the local municipalities, who lease them to private tenants. However, this activity is often no longer profitable, and thus pastures and huts remain unused and abandoned. This research provides an economic estimate of pastoral farming using the choice experiment (CE) method, also assessing the willingness to pay (WTP) for pastoral farming functions. The study examines different scenarios of upland farm management in order to provide recommendations for public owners on how to better manage these assets. The case study is located in an alpine area in northern Italy. Our results show a higher WTP for the attributes related to the traditional Alpine agricultural economy, with an emphasis on grazing. Several policy implications regarding agricultural renewal and support for mountain livelihoods are highlighted in the conclusions.
The Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs) are a fast growing landscape valuation technique. This paper describes some recent applications implemented in this field and identifies their attributes, levels, payment vehicles, experimental designs, innovations and econometric models. From this basis some important areas for future research are reflected upon. These include: choice task complexity, experimental design, preference and scale heterogeneity or econometric models' behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to survey the state of current DCE applications, identify knowledge gaps and suggest some reflections for future research in landscape valuation through DCEs.
2010
In many environmental valuation applications standard sample sizes for choice modelling surveys are impractical to achieve. One option to improve data quality is to use more in-depth surveys conducted on fewer respondents. This is certainly the case for studies on mountain visitation. We report on a study using high quality rank-ordered data in which the ranking of alternatives is elicited by means of the best-worst approach to alternative selection. The resulting exploded choice model involved the collection of 64 responses per person which were used to study the willingness to pay for external benefits produced to visitors by policies keeping in place the artifacts of alpine transhumance. The context of study is Val di Genova, a valley with summer pastures located in the North Eastern Alps where we study visitors WTP for pasture landscape, biodiversity, historical heritage and the up-keep of in-situ milk transformation. We find good evidence in support of this approach and find reasonable estimates of mean WTP, which appear theoretically valid.
2017
The objective of this paper is to improve the understanding of attribute non-attendance (ANA) in a choice experiment (CE) investigating farmers' WTA for participating in agri-environmental schemes in southern Spain. Evidence is found of ANA behaviour for both stated and inferred approaches, with models accounting for ANA clearly outperforming those that do not account for it; however, we produce no conclusive results as to which ANA approach is best. In addition, we investigate sources of observed heterogeneity related to ANA behaviour, our results hinting at a positive relationship between ease of scheme adoption and non-attendance to attributes.
A choice experiment versus a contingent valuation approach to agri-environmental policy valuation
2011
The non-market value accruing from an agri-environmental scheme can be examined by assessing the public's willingness to pay for the policy outputs as a whole or by modelling the preferences of society for the component attributes of the rural landscape that result from the implementation of the policy. In this paper we examine if the welfare impacts from implementing an agri-environmental policy are significantly different if one uses a holistic valuation methodology such as contingent valuation or an attribute based valuation methodology such as choice experiments. It is argued that the valuation methodology chosen should be based on whether or not the overall objective is the valuation of the agri-environment policy package in its entirety or the valuation of each of the policy's distinct environmental outputs.
Valuing enhancements to forest recreation using choice experiment and contingent behaviour methods
Journal of Forest Economics, 2007
This research utilises two valuation techniques (a frequency-based choice experiment model and a contingent behaviour model) to value a range of improvements to recreational facilities in forest and woodlands in Great Britain. We provide the first comparison in the literature of welfare results from these two approaches. Four groups of forest users are targeted in this research: cyclists, horse riders, nature watchers and general forest visitors, and look also at “sub-groupings” within these classes of forest user. We found that heterogeneity of preferences exists within each of these groups. In particular, more specialist forest user groups attain generally higher values for improvements than general users. For example, downhill mountain bikers were willing to pay more for the provision of dedicated downhill courses than family cyclists for easy cycle trails. It is also argued that the use of a frequency-based choice task in the choice experiment has advantages over the more traditional choice tasks for applications such as forest recreation since a frequency-based task better reflects actual behaviour and encourages respondents to pay closer attention to the “distance travelled” attribute.