Densities Rather than Shares: Improving the Measurement of Congestion in Recreation Demand Models

Angel Bujosa Bestard, Antoni Riera, Robert Hicks and Kenneth McConnell

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2015, vol. 61, issue 2, 127-140

Abstract: While economists have successfully addressed the endogeneity of congestion in revealed preference approaches, little attention has been devoted to measuring congestion. In fact, most applications measure congestion as a simple count of users or, at best, consider the shares of users, defined as the proportion of people visiting a site during the course of the season. However, only when all sites have a similar size or length and the total number of visitors is constant over time, can these measures be used as a proxy for congestion. In general, these assumptions are unrealistic. In this paper we examine site density measures rather than participation shares as a measure of congestion. We show that endogeneity problems can be addressed using a control function approach and demonstrate that the density of users leads to more statistically significant coefficients of congestion. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Beaches; Congestion; Control function; Endogeneity; Recreation demand; Travel cost method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10640-014-9785-9 (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:enreec:v:61:y:2015:i:2:p:127-140

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10640-014-9785-9

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman

More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().