We report and interpret preferences of a sample of the Dutch adult population for different strategies to end the so-called ‘intelligent lockdown’ which their government had put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a discrete choice experiment, we invited participants to make a series of choices between policy scenarios aimed at relaxing the lockdown, which were specified not in terms of their nature (e.g. whether or not to allow schools to re-open) but in terms of their effects along seven dimensions. These included health-related effects, but also impacts on the economy, education, and personal income. From the observed choices, we were able to infer the implicit trade-offs made by the Dutch between these policy effects. For example, we find that the average citizen, in order to avoid one fatality directly or indirectly related to COVID-19, is willing to accept a lasting lag in the educational performance of 18 children, or a lasting (>3 years) and substantial (>15%) reduction in net income of 77 households. We explore heterogeneity across individuals in terms of these trade-offs by means of latent class analysis. Our results suggest that most citizens are willing to trade-off health-related and other effects of the lockdown, implying a consequentialist ethical perspective. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that the elderly, known to be at relatively high risk of being affected by the virus, are relatively reluctant to sacrifice economic pain and educational disadvantages for the younger generation, to avoid fatalities. We also identify a so-called taboo trade-off aversion amongst a substantial share of our sample, being an aversion to accept morally problematic policies that simultaneously imply higher fatality numbers and lower taxes. We explain various ways in which our results can be of value to policy makers in the context of the COVID-19 and future pandemics.

We seek to disentangle the effect of knowledge about an environmental good on respondents' propensity to ignore one or more attributes on the choice cards in a discrete choice experiment eliciting people's preferences for increased protection of cold-water corals in Norway. We hypothesize that a respondent's level of knowledge influences the degree to which she ignores attributes. Respondents participated in a quiz on cold-water coral prior to the valuation task and we use the result of the quiz as anex-antemeasure of their knowledge. Our results suggests that a high level of knowledge, measured by a high quiz score, is associated with higher probabilities of attendance to the three non-cost attributes, although this effect is only significant for one of them. A higher quiz score is also associated with a significantly lower probability of attending to the cost attribute. Furthermore, although being told your score has mixed directional effects on attribute non-attendance, it does not significantly affect the probability of attending to any of the attributes. Finally, allowing for attribute non-attendance leads to substantially lower conditional willingness-to-pay estimates. This highlights the importance of measuring how much people know about the goods over which they are choosing, and underlines that more research is needed to understand how information influences the degree to which respondents ignore attributes

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It is well-known that operating within the boundaries of a national park provides commercial actors with the opportunity to charge a price premium, though this has to a lesser degree been demonstrated for marine protected areas. We estimate national tourists' willingness-to-pay a price premium for boat trips in the Nha Trang Bay Marine Protected Are, Vietnam, using a discrete choice experiment. Our results show that tourists are willing to pay an average price premium of 18 USD per trip for a large improvement in environmental quality, and that avoiding the loss of jobs for local fishermen is of minor importance. Furthermore, the economic benefits generated from management scenarios that combine biodiversity restoration and environmental quality improvement within the reserve sufficient to cover additional costs of such improvements.

Accumulating evidence suggests that respondents in stated choice experiments use simplifying strategies. Such behavior is a deviation from random utility theory and can lead to wrong inferences regarding preferences. This is a first attempt to systematically explore satisficing in stated choice experiments. We consider 944 satisficing rules and allow respondents to revise the rules adopted throughout the choice sequence. Only a minority of respondents used the same satisficing rule across the entire sequence. Allowing for updating reveals that the use of the heuristic changes over the choice sequence. Considering satisficing behavior leads to improved model fits and different marginal willingness-to-pay estimates.