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

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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.