Dealing with preference uncertainty in contingent willingness to pay for a nature protection program: A new approach

Louinord Voltaire, Claudio Pirrone and Denis Bailly

Ecological Economics, 2013, vol. 88, issue C, 76-85

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an alternative preference uncertainty measurement approach where respondents have the option to indicate their willingness to pay (WTP) for a nature protection program either as exact values or intervals from a payment card, depending on whether they are uncertain about their valuation. On the basis of their responses, we then estimate their degree of uncertainty. New within this study is that the respondent's degree of uncertainty is “revealed”, while it is “stated” in those using existing measurement methods. Three statistical models are used to explore the sources of respondent uncertainty. We also present a simple way of calculating the uncertainty adjusted mean WTP, and compare this to the one obtained from an interval regression. Our findings in terms of determinants of preference uncertainty are broadly consistent with a priori expectations. In addition, the uncertainty adjusted mean WTP is quite similar to the one derived from an interval regression. We conclude that our method is promising in accounting for preference uncertainty in WTP answers at little cost to interviewees in terms of time and cognitive effort, on the one hand, and without researcher assumptions regarding the interpretation of degrees of uncertainty reported by respondents, on the other.

Keywords: Contingent valuation; Preference uncertainty; Payment card; Uncertainty calibration; Willingness to pay; Nature protection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q20 Q26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800913000189
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecolec:v:88:y:2013:i:c:p:76-85

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2013.01.009

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).