Earmarking conservation: Further inquiry on scope effects in stated preference methods applied to nature-based tourism

The way people assign value to nature conservation policies has important implications for management choices. Economic valuation surveys are affected by individual behavioural patterns that are not exhaustively explained by traditional sources of bias such as embedding, flagship species, fixed-budget, commodity misspecification and warm glows. Through a Contingent Valuation study of Alpine wildlife, we use an external scope test to evaluate the difference in willingness to pay among tourists for conservation policies targeted either to the ibex alone, or to the four ungulates populating the Gran Paradiso National Park in Northwest Italy (ibex, red deer, roe deer, chamois). We find that park users are willing to contribute significantly more to policies protecting one of the four ungulates than all four of them, a result that we argue should be ascribed to pure aversion to less specific policy objectives, i.e. to a preference for punctual earmarking of resources devoted to conservation.