Total Economic Valuation of Great Lakes Recreational Fisheries: Attribute Non-attendance, Hypothetical Bias and Insensitivity to Scope John C. Whitehead, Louis Cornicelli and Gregory Howard Abstract: We use stated preference methods to estimate willingness to pay to avoid reductions in recreational catch in Great Lakes fisheries. We compare willingness to pay estimates where uncertain “in favor” votes are recoded to “against” votes to an attribute non-attendance model that focuses on the policy cost attribute. We find that the two hypothetical bias models yield similar results ..read more

The Aggregate Economic Value of Great Lakes Recreational Fishing Trips John C. Whitehead, Louis Cornicelli, Lisa Bragg and Rob Southwick Abstract: We use the contingent valuation method in a survey of Great Lakes anglers to estimate the willingness to pay for a Great Lakes recreational fishing trip. Employing various assumptions and models, we find that the willingness to pay for a trip ranges from $54 to $101 ($2020). We then combine the willingness to pay per trip estimates with an estimate of the number of trips and find that the aggregate economic value of Great Lakes fishing trips in the ..read more

They doth protest too much, methinks: Reply to “Reply to Whitehead” John C. Whitehead No 24-04, Working Papers from Department of Economics, Appalachian State University Abstract: Desvousges, Mathews and Train (2020) point out a mistake in my comment on their 2015 paper. When this mistake is corrected the conclusions drawn in my comment are unchanged. In addition, the authors claim that I make another 11 “mistakes”. In this paper I argue that these “mistakes” are mostly fairly standard practice in the contingent valuation method. Desvousges, Mathews and Train misread and distort this literatur ..read more

From the inbox: The International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics has published the following new issue. The articles in this issue are freely avaible until 20 February[*]. For other issues or for subscription information, please visit the journal webpage. Volume 17, Issue 4 - Special Issue Honoring Thomas H. Tietenberg   Kathleen Segerson (2023), "Introduction: Honoring Thomas H. Tietenberg" https://nowpublishers.com/article/Details/IRERE-163   Henk Folmer (2023), "Tom Tietenberg's Merits for the International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics ..read more

I wrote a referee comment to the effect of: Many contingent valuation method researchers use the nonparametrice Turnbull WTP estimates for hypothesis testing. This is inappropriate when the data must be "pooled" to get the willingness to pay (e.g., the "vote in favor" variable) to decrease with the cost amount. Sometimes, due to small samples, poorly chosen cost amounts or respondent inattentiveness, the percentage of “vote in favor” responses is not monotonically decreasing with the cost amount. The Turnbull estimator requires that the “vote in favor” responses are pooled over prices until t ..read more

Tanga Mohr and John Whitehead [1] Department of Economics  Appalachian State University Introduction The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a cap-and-trade program that covers the electric power sector in more than 10 northeastern states. The cap-and-trade program creates markets for a limited number CO2 allowances, reducing greenhouse gases. Laboratory experiments were used to inform RGGI about the most efficient design for the primary auction and the secondary markets (e.g., Shobe et al. 2010). These experiments were single unit auctions but RGGI conducts multi-unit auctions ..read more

In which we* use old-timey contingent valuation willingness to pay for a recreation trip questions. After this paper and others (in the past and in the future), I'm thinking that attribute non-attendance mitigates hypothetical bias, fat tails, scope insensitivity, etc. I'm not sure why it hasn't caught on 100% yet. Everyone seems to think that if we can only use stated preference "best practices" then everything is going to be fine. I think no, everything isn't fine (and that doesn't even factor in the enormous cost of stated preference "best practices." Here is the link: https://econpapers.re ..read more

From Data are Plural (10/11):  Michigan air permit violations. For local news organization Planet Detroit, freelance journalist Shelby Jouppi has built a daily-updating dashboard of air quality permit violations cited by Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy. The dataset lists 1,500+ violation notices since 2018; for each, it provides the notice date and findings, facility name and location, and more. To construct it, Jouppi had to scrape individual notice PDFs from the department’s website and then extract the ..read more

From the WaPo (Olive oil prices reach record highs as Spain’s harvest is halved): Extreme heat, wildfires and drought have decimated much of the world’s olive oil harvest yet again, driving prices to a record high of $9,000 per metric ton. Most home cooks aren’t buying olive oil by the ton. But retail olive oil prices in the United States have risen in recent years because of extreme weather in olive-oil-producing countries, growing 12.5 percent this year atop an 8.8 percent increase in 2022, according to Circana, a Chicago-based market research firm. Spain, the source of half the world’s oli ..read more

I recently received a request for the NLogit code for this article: Whitehead, John C., and Daniel K. Lew. "Estimating recreation benefits through joint estimation of revealed and stated preference discrete choice data." Empirical Economics 58 (2020): 2009-2029. I was happy to oblige but it took a second because, since we estimated those models, I had gone into the program and tried a bunch of attribute non-attendance models. The program was a mess. So, I had to hunt the different models down and rerun everything to make sure it was working and ... discovered a minor error in Table 6. The sc ..read more