Total Economic Valuation of Great Lakes Recreational Fisheries: Attribute Non-attendance, Hypothetical Bias and Insensitivity to Scope
John C. Whitehead, Louis Cornicelli and Gregory Howard
Abstract: We use stated preference methods to estimate willingness to pay to avoid reductions in recreational catch in Great Lakes fisheries. We compare willingness to pay estimates where uncertain “in favor” votes are recoded to “against” votes to an attribute non-attendance model that focuses on the policy cost attribute. We find that the two hypothetical bias models yield similar results. We estimate another attribute non-attendance model that also considers the scope of the policy and find that the scope elasticity is significantly underestimated in other models. The willingness to pay in this last model is higher than in the other models.
Key Words: Attribute non-attendance, Hypothetical bias, Scope test, Willingess to pay