Incidental and Joint Consumption in Recreation Demand

Abstract

A theory for analyzing incidental consumption in a single site recreation demand model is presented. We show that incidental consumption on a recreation trip, such as a visit to see friends or a visit to a second recreation site, can be treated as a complementary good and analyzed using conventional theory. We also show that the analysis applies whether the side trips are incidental or joint. In a simple application we find that failing to account for incidental consumption appears to create little bias in valuing recreation sites.

A travel cost assessment of the demand for recreation in Swiss forests

“…If the answer is not zero, the interview continues asking distance, means of transport, number of accompanying persons, and duration of the visit. A controversy of TCM is the multi-purpose, or incidental trips issue (Parsons et al 1997;Loomis 2006), which can be difficult to handle. Indeed, such trips must be treated with caution, by correctly disentangling travel costs by visited sites.…”

“…As we deal with Swiss forests in general, it is not possible to account for substitution possibilities between forests as recommended in Parsons (2003). In addition, potential substitutes (all leisure activities) are very varied and controlling for them in an appropriate way is not practically feasible.…”

“…Since we value four types of forests, our design does not exactly correspond to the single-site TCM as presented in Parsons (2003). We hence first estimate a pooled model with interaction variables between the travel cost variables and a dummy for the forest zones, following Garcia and Jacob (2010).…”

“…Feather and Shaw (1999) have developed a model to control for the imperfect leisure-work substitutability, but it comes with much complication in the empirical approach. Hence, most scholars choose to use a fraction of wage (from 25% to 100%) (Parsons 2003) or lower (Amoako-Tuffour and Martínez-Espiñeira 2012). A relatively new approach is to estimate the cost of time through a stated preferences approach (Ovaskainen et al 2012).…”

Valuing forest recreation on the national level in a transition economy: The case of Poland

“…If the weight was less than 50 percent, the observation was dropped as it can reasonably be assumed that many people would make the trip in any case. More advanced approaches to deal with multiple-destination trips suggested for example by Parsons and Wilson (1997) were for simplicity not pursued here.…”