What are the consequences of ignoring attributes in choice experiments? Implications for ecosystem service valuation

Sergio Colombo, Michael Christie and Nick Hanley

Ecological Economics, 2013, vol. 96, issue C, 25-35

Abstract: This paper investigates the sensitivity of choice experiment values 3AL for ecosystem services to ‘attribute non-attendance’. We consider three cases of attendance, namely that people may always, sometimes, or never pay attention to a given attribute in making their choices. This allows a series of models to be estimated which addresses the following questions: To what extent do respondents ignore attributes in choice experiments? What is the impact of alternative strategies for dealing with attribute non-attendance? Can respondents reliably self-report non-attendance? Do respondents partially attend to attributes, and what are the implications of this? Our results show that allowing for the instance of ‘sometimes attending’ to attributes in making choices offers advantages over methods employed thus far in the literature.

Keywords: Choice experiments; Attribute non-attendance; Biodiversity values; Ecosystem service values; Stated preference methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800913002735
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:96:y:2013:i:c:p:25-35

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2013.08.016

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 ().