Referendum Design and Contingent Valuation: The NOAA Panel's No-Vote Recommendation

Abstract

This paper considers the effects for offering a "would-not-vote" option in contingent valuation (CV) questions framed using the referendum format. This approach arises from a suggestion made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) panel on contingent valuation. The NOAA panel was asked to evaluate the use of this method for estimating the economic value of nonmarketed environmental resources in the context of natural resource damage assessments. This test used the CV questionnaire developed for the study of the Exxon Valdez oil spill conducted by the State of Alaska with in-person interviews. The findings suggest that when those selecting the "would-not-vote" response are treated as having voted "against" the program (a conservative coding), offering this option does not alter (1) the distribution of "for" and "against" responses (2) the estimates of willingness to pay derived from these choices, or (3) the construct validity of the results. © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Experimental Evidence on Alternative Environmental Valuation Methods

“…18. Carson et al (1998) and Krosnick et al (2002) undertake evaluations of this treatment using a replication of the hypothetical Exxon Valdez CVM survey. 19.…”

Scale of harvesting by non-industrial private forest landowners

“…11 Appendix 1 presents the critical question from the survey. The price offer table follows the MBDC approach of Welsh and Poe (1998) and referendum design as summarized by Carson et al (1998). In our application of this approach, respondents were asked whether or not they would accept a given amount to give up a resource, i.e., harvest their standing timber, and then asked to state their confidence in their ARTICLE IN PRESS 10 Hodge and Southard (1992) also found this for a survey of 3000 non-industrial landowners in Virginia, as did Conway et al (2003) and Sullivan et al (2005).…”

What does it take to get family forest owners to enroll in a forest stewardship-type program?

“…Champ et al (2005) and Caudill and Groothuis (2005) provide comprehensive reviews of the literature. Common approaches have been to: (1) drop the not sure responses from estimation analyses altogether (Kniivilä, 2006); (2) reassign all of the not sure responses to either the yes or no response category (Carson et al, 1998); (3) split the not sure responses between the yes and no response category based upon either followup questions to the DC question (Haener and Adamowicz, 1998) or inferences about the not sure respondents (Caudill and Groothuis, 2005); or (4) include the not sure responses in value estimations directly using maximum likelihood procedures (Wang, 1997).…”