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Protest Adjustments in the Valuation of Watershed Restoration Using Payment Card Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2016

Alan R. Collins  and
Randall S. Rosenberger
Alan R. Collins
Affiliation:
Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at West Virginia University in Morgantown
Randall S. Rosenberger
Affiliation:
Department of Forest Resources at Oregon State University in Corvallis
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Abstract

When using a willingness-to-pay (WTP) format in contingent valuation (CV) to value watershed restoration, respondents may protest by questioning why they should pay to clean up a pollution problem that someone else created. Using a sample selection interval data model based on Bhat (1994) and Brox, Kumar, and Stollery (2003), we found that the decision to protest and WTP values were correlated. Protest sample selection bias resulted in a 300 percent overestimate of mean WTP per respondent. Using different ad hoc treatments of protesters, protest bias resulted in moderate effects (−10 percent to +14 percent) after controlling for sample selection bias.

Keywords

contingent valuationprotest biaswatershed restorationsample selectiongrouped Tobit
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Agricultural and Resource Economics Review , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , October 2007 , pp. 321 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association 

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