In 1967, a group of resource and environmental economists from across the nation got together under the auspices of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to form a multistate collaborative research project. The goal of this research initiative was to bring together natural resource and environmental economists from across land grant and non-land grant institutions in order to advance natural resource benefit and cost methods, collect primary data on pertinent natural resource policies, and develop applications for extending the usefulness of primary data on the benefits and costs of natural resource policy. Initially given the USDA project identification number WM-59, the Western Regional Research Project: Benefits and Costs of Natural Resources Policies Affecting Public and Private Lands has been a productive intellectual, professional, and policymaking endeavor for more than forty-two years. While the project indentifying moniker has been changed from time to time (from WM-59 to W133 to W1133 to W2133) and there has been the loss, sometimes untimely, of project participants over the years, the group continuously provides opportunities for some of the nation's most engaged resource and environmental economists to work together, share their ideas, provide feedback and support, and advance the state-of-the art in valuation methods and applications.

The assumption of independence of irrelevant alternatives in a sequential contingent valuation format should be questioned. Statistically, most valuation studies treat nonindependence as a consequence of unobserved individual effects. Another approach is to consider an inferential process in which any particular choice is part of a general choosing strategy of a survey respondent. A stochastic model is suggested, consistent with the reflexivity, transitivity, and continuity axioms of utility analysis. An application of this theoretical model to the valuation of watershed ecosystem restoration demonstrates that an empirical model recognizing reflexivity and transitivity, and also allowing for continuity, shows the highest in-sample predictive ability.

This paper demonstrates how corner solutions raise difficulties for the specification, estimation, and use of incomplete demand systems for welfare measurement with disaggregate consumption data, as is common in the outdoor recreation literature. A simple analytical model of consumer behavior is used to elucidate the potential biases for welfare measurement arising from modeling the demand for M goods as a function of M + N prices (N > 1) and income when individuals do not consume all goods in strictly positive quantities. Results from a Monte Carlo experiment suggest that these biases can be substantial for large-scale policy shocks when prices are highly correlated.

Willingness to pay (WTP) estimation typically involves some strategy for mapping nondichotomous contingent valuation (CV) responses onto a dichotomous yes/no dependent variable. We propose a new approach to selecting which responses qualify as ‘yes.’ We apply the proposed method to polychotomous CV data for preventative land management programs in the Great Basin. We also estimate WTP using other methods of response recoding found in the literature. By contrasting the results under different approaches, we demonstrate how and why WTP point estimates vary across recoding methods and discuss the comparative advantages of our more generalized recoding approach that is based on predicted probabilities of ‘yes’ responses.

The Truckee/Carson/Walker River watershed in northern Nevada is under an imminent threat of infestation by the New Zealand mud snail, an aquatic nuisance species with the potential to harm recreational fisheries. We combine a utility-theoretic system-demand model of recreational angling with a Bayesian econometric framework to provide estimates of trip and welfare losses under different types of regulatory control policies. We find that such losses can be substantial, warranting immediate investments in preemptive strategies via public outreach and awareness campaigns.

This paper examines heterogeneity in the preferences for OHV recreation by applying the random parameters Poisson model to a data set of off-highway vehicle (OHV) users at four National Forest sites in North Carolina. The analysis develops estimates of individual consumer surplus and finds that estimates are systematically affected by the random parameter specification. There is also substantial evidence that accounting for individual heterogeneity improves the statistical fit of the models and provides a more informative description of OHV riders.

Off-highway vehicle (OHV) use is a rapidly growing outdoor activity that results in a host of environmental and management problems. Federal agencies have been directed to develop travel management plans to improve recreation experiences, reduce social conflicts, and diminish environmental impacts of OHVs. We examine the effect of land access restrictions on the welfare of OHV enthusiasts in Utah using Murdock's unobserved heterogeneity random utility model (Murdock 2006). Our models indicate that changing access to public lands from fully “open” to “limited” results in relatively small welfare losses, but that prohibiting access results in much larger welfare losses.

This paper explores the use of functional benefits transfer to forecast the effects of waste sites on property values. The results of a meta-analysis of hedonic studies of waste sites are coupled with spatial analysis techniques to produce estimates of the effects of toxic contamination in Areas of Concern (AOCs) in the U.S. Great Lakes. Based on U.S. Census data for median home values, the methods used here suggest that approximately S5.2 billion (2005 dollars) have been lost in residential property values surrounding twenty-three of the AOCs. This compares to estimates that place the cost of remediation of all U.S. AOCs at up to $4.5 billion (2005 dollars). The case study also identifies issues surrounding the use of a meta-analysis with hedonic property value studies to support functional transfer.

This paper presents a multinational meta-analysis estimated to identify systematic components of willingness to pay for surface water quality improvements, developed to support benefit transfer for Canadian policy development. Metadata are drawn from stated preference studies that estimate WTP for water quality changes affecting aquatic life habitats—a type of study with few Canadian examples. The goals of this paper are to assess the properties of a multinational (United States/Canada) meta-analysis compared to a single-country (U.S.) analog; illustrate the potential information that may be derived as well as the analytical challenges; and assess the performance of resulting meta-functions for benefit transfer.