Citizen's Preferences for Environmental Options: Evidence on Existence and Triggering

公民对环境选择的偏好：存在和触发的证据

• 批准号: 9727376
• 负责人: Clifford Russell
• 金额: $ 20万
• 依托单位: Vanderbilt University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1997
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1997-10-01 至 2000-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9727376&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Citizen; Preferences; Environmental; Options; Evidence

This project was suggested by questions from focus group respondents to a forest-valuation, multi-attribute utility (MAU) questionnaire-in-the-making, who asked, in so many words, `Should we use our personal preferences in responding or should we put on our citizen hats and try to say what we think would be in the public interest?` The possibility that at least some significant fraction of ordinary people have available to or more preference orderings over unfamiliar, albeit not wildly exotic, environmental options offers a striking contrast to the view, coming out of psychology, that people are unlikely to be aware of any preferences in such settings, until these are constructed during questioning. Our objective is to investigate the claim of these respondents by seeking evidence for or against it in a specially devised, 3-attribute MAU survey about preferences over management options for a forested park in Nashville, TN. Our general hypothesis is that, by stressing one or another of several `themes` for the questions, we can trigger predictably different response patterns across subsamples. While there is a long and respectable literature concerning the existence and importance of multiple preference orderings co-existing in the same individual, not nearly enough is know about the phenomenon empirically. Greater knowledge will help us understand its practical importance in such current areas of research as: the use of information as a policy tool; the interpretation of warm glow effects and non-use benefits; and even the explanation of the observed difference between mean bids evoked by dichotomous and by open-ended CV question formats.

这个项目是由一份正在制作的森林评估、多属性效用（MAU）问卷调查的焦点小组受访者提出的问题提出的，他们用很多话问：“我们是应该用我们的个人偏好来回答，还是应该戴上公民的帽子，试着说出我们认为符合公共利益的东西？”“至少有相当一部分普通人对不熟悉的（尽管不是非常奇特的）环境选项有更多的偏好排序，这种可能性与心理学的观点形成了鲜明的对比。心理学认为，在这种环境中，人们不太可能意识到任何偏好，直到这些偏好在询问过程中形成。”我们的目标是调查这些受访者的主张，通过在一个专门设计的，关于田纳西州纳什维尔森林公园管理选项偏好的3属性MAU调查中寻找支持或反对它的证据。我们的一般假设是，通过强调问题的几个“主题”中的一个或另一个，我们可以在子样本中触发可预测的不同响应模式。虽然关于多重偏好排序共存于同一个体的存在和重要性的文献已经有很长一段时间了，但从经验上对这一现象的了解还远远不够。更多的知识将帮助我们理解它在当前研究领域的实际重要性，如：将信息用作政策工具；诠释暖光效果及非使用效益；甚至解释了二分法和开放式CV问题格式所引起的平均出价之间的差异。