Using Stated Preferences:Comments

Anna AlberiniUniversity of Maryland

What Should We Use SP for?

• Presentations are focused on the benefits of TMDL requirements

• …but they could also be used to assess potential and cost-effectiveness of policies, esp. those aimed at homeowners, small businesses, numerous entities– E.g. rain gardens, rain barrels– See ERS-USDA researchers present at this

workshop

Stated Preference Methods • Contingent valuation– would you pay $X for…?– gets non-use values– Protest responses

• Contingent behavior – Would you still go to…/how many times would you go to…

[under new conditions]?– Well suited with recreational users

• Conjoint choice experiments– Private goods [e.g., recreational trips] or policy packages– Attribute-based– Non-use values?

Moore presentation

• Combined RP-SP– recreational users/uses

• Can do within the same questionnaire in original survey

• Likely to work well for Bay recreational users and commercial fishermen

– Housing values• Earlier work has produced

mixed results

• No data on non-fishing recreation/other places in watershed

– Not difficult to develop new data:• Marinas, state registration

lists for boaters, etc.

Moore presentation (2)• Concerns about double

counting– Select your categories of

users/not users carefully

• Concerns about time horizons re: credibility of questionnaire– People probably

understand that it took a long time to mess up the Bay and that it will take a long time to fix it up

• Payment vehicle– People may have preferences

over the payment vehicle– E.g., I am willing to pay for

improved storm water mgmt. but not for farmers to improve their practices (even if they affected the CB to the same extent)

– Split-sample treatments to test?

– “distance traveled for choice experiment” (slide 4)?

Boyd-Krupnick Take home message:

U=U(Acres, h(Acres), g(h(Acres))

Acres of wetlands

Ecological services of wetlands

Home production function of ecological services of wetlands

• Earlier SP research has found that people are generally willing to pay more for more acres, more species abundance, etc.

• Scope but not WTP not strictly proportional to acres, species, etc.

Both presentations

• “Iconic” value of the CB prefer to say “historic/cultural heritage site”

• Why worry about “warm glow?” perfectly legitimate component of WTP for the Bay, esp. non-users

• Concur that surveys should not focus on jobs, watermen, Amish, …