Accounting for Latent Attitudes in Willingness-to-Pay Studies: The Case of Coastal Water Quality Improvements in Tobago
Accounting for Latent Attitudes in Willingness-to-Pay Studies: The Case of Coastal Water Quality Improvements in Tobago
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DOI：
10.1007/s10640-011-9522-6
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发表时间：
2012-05-01
影响因子：
5.9
通讯作者：
Beharry-Borg, Nesha
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hess, Stephane;Beharry-Borg, Nesha
对人类行为的研究，特别是对个人选择的研究，在环境经济学领域引起了极大的兴趣。人们对个人偏好的差异给予了极大的关注，人们意识到，这种差异至少部分是由于潜在的态度和信念造成的。虽然这在实证研究中得到了证实，但通常使用的方法是基于对态度问题的回答被误导地使用，作为潜在态度的直接衡量标准。正如在其他文献中所讨论的，特别是在运输研究中，这可能会导致测量误差和内生性偏差，而态度应该被视为潜在变量。在本文中，我们说明了在海滩游客愿意为改善水质买单的背景下，这种综合选择和潜在变量模型的应用。我们展示了一个潜在的态度变量，我们称之为支持干预态度，如何帮助解释所述选择练习的反应，以及对与受访者态度相关的各种评级问题的答案。潜在变量的加入导致了模型拟合的重要收益和本质上不同的支付意愿模式。
The study of human behaviour and in particular individual choices is of great interest in the field of environmental economics. Substantial attention has been paid to the way in which preferences vary across individuals, and there is a realisation that such differences are at least in part due to underlying attitudes and convictions. While this has been confirmed in empirical work, the methods typically employed are based on the arguably misguided use of responses to attitudinal questions as direct measures of underlying attitudes. As discussed in other literature, especially in transport research, this potentially leads to measurement error and endogeneity bias, and attitudes should rather be treated as latent variables. In this paper, we illustrate the use of such an Integrated Choice and Latent Variable model in the context of beach visitors' willingness-to-pay for improvements in water quality. We show how a latent attitudinal variable, which we refer to as a pro-intervention attitude, helps explain both the responses from the stated choice exercise as well as answers to various rating questions related to respondent attitudes. The incorporation of the latent variable leads to important gains in model fit and substantially different willingness-to-pay patterns.