Willingness to Pay for Submerged Maritime Cultural Resources

John Whitehead and Suzanne Finney

Journal of Cultural Economics, 2003, vol. 27, issue 3, 240 pages

Abstract: Many consider salvage value and tourism expenditures as the only economic values of a historic shipwreck. This paper looks at one alternative, the non-market value generated by management of shipwrecks as submerged maritime cultural resources. We consider the question: How much are people willing to pay to maintain shipwrecks in their pristine state? The contingent valuation method was implemented during summer 2001 as part of a telephone survey to households in eastern North Carolina. We find that households are willing to pay about $35 in a one-time increase in state taxes. Willingness to payis internally validated by expected relationships with prices and income but fails to pass the scope test. We speculate that we inadvertently succumbed to the well-known “birds” problem. The double-bounded willingness to pay questions are not incentive compatible and are subject to starting point bias, despite efforts to minimize these effects. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2003

Keywords: historic shipwreck; incentive incompatibility; starting point bias; willingness to pay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1026384602020 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jculte:v:27:y:2003:i:3:p:231-240

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10824/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/A:1026384602020

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economics is currently edited by Federico Etro and Douglas Noonan

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economics from Springer, The Association for Cultural Economics International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().