A divisia version of the country-product-dummy method

A Divisia version of the country-product-dummy method of Kravis et al. is obtained and extended to include income as an explanatory variable. Income elasticities of relative prices for eight goods across 15 countries are obtained and compared with the income elasticities of the demand for these goods.     

Respondent direct experience and contingent willingness to pay for new commodities: a switching endogenous interval regression analysis

Most environmental economists argue that direct experience with the good being valuated, or with similar goods, is a precondition for providing valid willingness to pay (WTP) responses to contingent valuation questions. Two questions are posed in this article. The first is whether previous use experience of a resource (Séné nature reserve) similar to that being valuated (future nature reserves) and located in the same geographical area (Gulf of Morbihan) impacts on WTP. The second is whether accounting for the endogeneity of direct experience matters in the estimation of WTP. We find that respondents who have not experienced the Séné nature reserve provide value estimates that are statistically comparable to that of respondents who have experienced it. Our assumption is that respondents have acquired sufficient and adequate experience of future nature reserves from the questionnaire that experience obtained by experiencing the Séné nature reserve was not necessary for making a valid value formulation. Hence, aggregation of WTP estimates to obtain a total valuation of the future nature reserves is reasonable over the full target population. In addition, our results show that direct experience is endogenously determined; but controlling for the endogeneity has a marginal effect on WTP estimates.     

Valuing cultural world heritage sites: an application of the travel cost method to Mont-Saint-Michel

This article, using the zonal version of the travel cost method (ZTCM), provides the first economic valuation of recreational trips to Mont-Saint-Michel (MSM). The MSM was designated as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage Site in 1979, and is the most visited coastal site in France. The potential effects on consumer surplus (CS) estimates of some aspects of the ZTCM are considered, namely the treatment of the multiple purpose/destination (MP/D) trips, the inclusion of the opportunity cost of time (OCT) in the recreation demand model and the heterogeneity in the preferences. The heterogeneity in the preferences is examined through a random parameters Poisson model (RPPM). The RPPM generalizes the standard Poisson model (SPM) by allowing coefficients of explanatory variables to vary randomly across geographical units rather than being fixed. Our results show that (1) substantial CS values are associated with the MSM; (2) excluding/ignoring MP/D trips result in biased CS estimates; (3) omitting OCT does not substantially bias CS estimates; (4) the RPPM provides richer information about the impact of explanatory variables on the demand for trips than the SPM, but (5) leads to statistically similar CS estimates than the SPM.     

A sequential stochastic tree problem

We consider here the owner of a plot of land upon which he sequentially plants and harvests trees. The trees' growth paths follow a stochastic process, and the owner must decide when to harvest and replant, given knowledge of the process and each tree's growth history. The results of this analysis are compared with the non-repeated case derived by Brock, Rothschild and Stiglitz (1979) (hereafter B.R.S.) and found to be qualitatively similar.     

A convergent validity test within the payment card format using simulation techniques

A convergent validity test is performed between two groups of versions of the payment card format. The first group, the classic payment card (CPC), asks respondents to report their willingness to pay (WTP) as a point from a list of amounts, and then treats each WTP response as an interval. The second group generates WTP data that may contain both single point and interval values. It includes the two-way-payment ladder (TWPL) (respondents have to tick amounts they would definitely pay and cross amounts they would definitely not pay), and point-interval payment card (PIPC) (respondents have to tick their WTP as either a point or an interval). The test is conducted using data from one TWPL study and two PIPC studies. For each study, we use WTP values stated to simulate 200 CPC WTP datasets, which allows controlling for any behavioral biases likely to confound the outcome of the test. The results challenge the conventional way of eliciting WTP under the CPC and the typical way of treating WTP data from this PC version. Although convergent validity holds between the TWPL/PIPC and CPC, parameter and mean WTP estimates from the TWPL and PIPC are more stable as PC intervals widths increase.