A proposed plan to preserve beach and beach access along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore thorugh beach re-nourishment offers the opportunity to apply contingent valuation techniques to explore the implications of three sources of preference heterogeneity for measures of people's willingness to pay. Preferences are modeled as functions of: (a) attitudes, socio-economic and demographic characteristics; (b) past experience with the Cape Hatteras area; (c) anticipated future use; and (d) knowledge about the problem and proposed plans to address it. We find that while income and environmentalist attitudes have limited indirect effects on respondent willingness to pay for beach re-nourishment, past and future use of the resource, as well as respondent knowledge about the re-nourishment plan, directly affect willingness to pay.
