Environmental resource information and the validity of non-use values: the case of remote mountain lakes

Abstract

The NOAA guidelines for the implementation of stated preference techniques for economic valuation of environmental resources (Arrow et al 1993) suggest that the outcomes of stated preference techniques should be compared to the opinions and rankings of experts as a test of their validity. Theoretical and empirical studies have indicated that the reliability of stated preference responses may be called into question when the level of information or knowledgeability that respondents bring to the survey is low, where there is a low level of familiarity with the good being valued, or the 'relevance' of the good to the individual is in question (Ajzen 1996, Mas-Colell et al 1995, Bergstrom et al 1986). In such cases the value of expert opinion as a validation of stated preference techniques may be amplified. Despite this only a few studies have addressed the reasoning behind the use of expert opinion in this way or have compared the preferences of experts and members of the public over the same goods (Boyle 1996, Kenyon and Edwards-Jones, 1998). To our knowledge no comparison has been made between the preference orderings of experts and members of the public for goods with a large non-use value component, the very class of resource values where the aforementioned problems are most likely to arise. This study endeavours to address the NOAA recommendation through the comparison of the outcomes of a Delphi experiment (consultation/consensus of experts) and a CVM survey, both of which address decisions concerning the same environmental resource. The comparison is broadened by the use of different levels of information for subsets of respondents to assess the informational effects, and hence different levels of knowledgeability on willingness to pay bids. This is undertaken for an environmental good for which non-use values are the predominant class of economic values, and for which public familiarity is low, i.e. Remote Mountain Lakes.

Parameterising User Uptake in Economic Evaluations: The role of discrete choice experiments

“…Early exploratory work is starting to emerge providing more nuanced evidence on their external validity: for example, the positive predictive value may be far better than the negative predictive value (Lambooij et al, ; Salampessy et al, ), and aggregated uptake predictions are likely to obscure individual level variability in preference (Krucien et al, ). The use of labelled DCEs, where alternatives are named explicitly (for example ‘male condom’, ‘TPrEP’ rather than ‘Alternative A’, ‘Alternative B’) has been shown to increase external validity (De Bekker‐Grob et al, ), as has carrying out experiments in populations with experience of making decisions relevant to the experiment's context (Groom et al, ; Blomquist and Whitehead, ). In this case, condom users have already made a proactive and informed decision to use HIV and pregnancy protection, perhaps making their indications of substitution to a less effective new product more reliable.…”