Protest response and willingness to pay for culturally significant urban trees: Implications for Contingent Valuation Method

Abstract

The Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) could assist green-space planning, management and appreciation by assigning a monetary value to urban trees. However, the use of CVM is limited by its inherent methodological weaknesses. A critical concern is the existence of a large proportion of survey respondents providing zero willingness-to-pay (WTP) and that these responses are not amenable to economic theory-known as 'protest' responses. Censoring protest responses from further treatment is a common practice, which warrants reconsideration in light of our CVM survey results. The survey involved 800 residents requested to state their WTP for preserving the culturally significant stonewall trees in urban Hong Kong. About 28% of respondents returned a zero WTP. For all respondents the strength of protest beliefs was assessed, and the relationship between protest beliefs and WTP were examined. Our analysis produced contradictory results: some protest items varied negatively with WTP as expected, but other items increased with it. Respondents' stated positive WTP harbored latent protest beliefs which are related to non-economic preference. The findings stand at odds with the assumptions underlying the censoring treatment and raise questions about the validity of WTP estimates. These methodological implications should be taken into account in using CVM.

Valuing Urban Landscape Using Subjective Well-Being Data: Empirical Evidence from Dalian, China

“…By creating a hypothetical market, research practitioners can elicit people's willingness to pay for the considered public good improvement or willingness to accept for compensating the public good loss. The contingent valuation method and choice experiment model are mostly used in stated preference study [15][16][17].…”

Public Acceptability of Introducing a Biogas Mandate in Korea: A Contingent Valuation Study

“…The CV technique has been very widely applied in the literature to obtain the WTP for non-market goods [16,17] and environmental goods [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]. Refer to Carson and Hanemann [34] for a better understanding of the CV technique and its implementation.…”

Comparing Value of Urban Green Space Using Contingent Valuation and Travel Cost Methods

“…The motivation of respondents becomes something very interesting to discuss because the benefits of urban green space are public goods whereby anyone can access and without pay or the cost of management is charged to the government. Even from some sample research found not a few respondents who are not willing to pay for the benefits they feel or commonly called "protest" responses [10]. Based on the set of various studies and journals some of the most common motivations are (1) the respondents consider that urban green space will make the urban environment better; (2) as an inheritance for future generations; and (3) to protect and conserve resources especially in urban areas.…”