Environmental Amenities as Sources for Product Differentiation and Market Power

This paper evaluates the importance of site-specific environmental amenities as a source of product differentiating market power. Using estimates from hedonic price equations and residual demand models, the analysis recovers firm-specific estimates of price markup and estimates of the marginal willingness to pay for access to coastal beaches. The application used in the analysis involves rental price and occupancy data for several thousand beach properties along a portion of the North Carolina coastline during the 1987 to 1992 rental seasons