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

这个项目是由焦点小组受访者向一份森林估值、多属性效用(MAU)问卷提出的问题提出的，该问卷正在制作中，他们问了很多话：我们是应该在回答时使用个人偏好，还是应该戴上我们的公民帽子，试图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有可能获得或更多偏好排序，而不是陌生的、尽管不是非常陌生的环境选项，这与心理学的观点形成了鲜明对比，即人们不太可能意识到在这样的环境中有任何偏好，除非这些偏好是在询问过程中构建的。我们的目标是通过在一项专门设计的关于田纳西州纳什维尔森林公园管理选择偏好的三属性MAU调查中，通过寻找支持或反对的证据来调查这些受访者的主张。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，我们可以在不同的子样本中触发可预测的不同反应模式。虽然有很长且值得尊敬的文献关于同一个体中共存的多个偏好排序的存在及其重要性，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：将信息用作政策工具；解释温暖发光效应和非使用效益；甚至解释由二分法和无限制简历问题格式引起的平均报价之间的差异。

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.