Estimating household willingness-to-pay for urban environmental amenities from a combined contingent valuation/contingent ranking survey.

摘要

This dissertation analyzes household willingness to pay for alternative urban pest control methods to manage an infestation of newly discovered beetles from a combined contingent valuation/contingent ranking survey. It makes three specific contributions to the literature: (1) it estimates the marginal values of the environmental and efficiency impacts of the alternative methods, (2) it addresses the importance of choice set selection in rank-ordered modeling, and (3) it develops a two-step discrete choice, sample selection estimation model.;Contingent ranking responses are analyzed using rank-ordered models. However, previous work on rank-ordered estimation as shown that less preferred alternatives may not always be ranked consistently. It may be the case, though, that less preferred alternatives are not in a respondent's preferred choice set of alternatives. Asking people to rank methods they would not support may lead to inconsistent responses, and misleading estimates of marginal willingness to pay.;This study develops a two-step discrete choice, sample selection procedure to estimate a censored rank-ordered model, when only those programs that a respondent would support, are used as the choice set for analysis. The estimates of marginal willingness to pay based on the censored model are compared to the estimates based on the model using all rankings. The results show that the choice set used in the analysis does have an impact. When all rankings are used, marginal willingness to pay for the efficiency characteristic is greater than for the environmental characteristic. When the preferred alternatives are used in the choice set, marginal willingness to pay for the environmental characteristic is greater.;The censored rank-ordered logit model was also used to estimate implicit discount rates on payments for environmental amenities, and marginal willingness to pay estimates based on the net present value of each program.;Previous work on the value of pest control has focused on protecting crops, or the aesthetic beauty of trees. However, there may also be a potential value to using environmentally benign, biological controls, in place of chemical controls, and to using permanent methods to manage pests. This work estimates those values based on responses to contingent valuation and contingent ranking questions.