Estimating the robustness of contingenet valuation estimates of WTP to survey mode and treatment of protest responses.

Abstract

Over the past four decades teh contingent valuation method (CVM) has become a technique frequently used by economists to estimate willingness-to-pay (WTP) for improvements in environmental quality and prot3tion of natural resources. The CVM was originall applied to estmate recreation use values (Davis, 1963; Hammack and Brown, 1974)and air quality (Brookshire et al. 1982; Randall et al. 1974). In the second decade the CVM was extended to valuing the general public's option and existence values of environmental improvements (Walsh et al, 1984). As part of this evolution. the overall design of CVM studies now attempts to construct a market for teh public good (Carson, 1991). As such, a typical CVM survey describes the public good to be valued, how the good will be paid for (that is, payment vehicle), the WTP question format (that is, open ended or closed ended)and a rule for deciding whether the good will be supplied (for example, majority rule in referendum or total benefits exceed total cost). Each of these design elements has received substatntial testing to determine whether the CVM WTP estimation are sensitive to the payment vehicle or WTP question format (Boyle, 2003). The key concern of CVM regarding the validity of the WTP estimates has also received extensive testing from the early days of CVM (Bishop and Heberlein, 1979) to the more recent (Murphy et al., 2005). .

Citation

Loomis, J.; Gonzalez-Caban, A.; Champ, J. 2011. Estimating the robustness of contingenet valuation estimates of WTP to survey mode and treatment of protest responses. In 2011 Bennett, J., editor, The International Handook on Non-market Environmental Evaluation. Northamptom, MS: Edward elgar Publishiing, Inc.; Pp: 102-121