Practitioners of outdoor sports, such as rock-climbers, are likely to exhibit preference heterogeneity that depends on the keenness' with which such sports are practiced. Such an intuition is born out in at least one study using latent class discrete choice modelling (Provencher et al. 2002)....

We develop and apply a new method for estimating the economic benefits of an environmental amenity. The method fits within the household production framework (Becker 1965), and is based upon the notion of estimating the derived demand for a privately traded option to utilize a freely-available...

The sample selection model is based upon a bivariate or a multivariate structure, and distributional assumptions are in this context more severe than in univariate settings, due to the limited availability of tractable multivariate distributions. While the standard FIML estimation of the...

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line...

Multi-attribute stated preference data, derived through choice experiments, is used to investigate the consequence of a finite number of preference groups in a sample of Yorkshire Water residential customers on the conditional distributions of willingness to pay in the sample. The research...

Quality of life factors continue to gain importance in residential location decisions as well as location decisions of firms. One such factor is an attractive local landscape. The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of the empirical literature on the role of landscape amenities in local...

In November 2005, 55.7 percent of 2 million Swiss voters approved a 5-year moratorium (ban) on the commercial cultivation of genetically modified (GM) plants within Switzerland. The present study examines how individual voting decisions were determined by (i) socioeconomic characteristics, (ii)...

What is the value of hazardous weather warnings? To answer this question, we focus on the avalanche bulletin for Switzerland issued by the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF). We take a survey-based, non-market valuation approach to estimating the value of hypothetical...

By using ad hoc value transfer protocols, this paper offers a methodological contribution and provides accurate per hectare estimates of the economic value of some selected ecosystem services for all forest biomes in the world, identified following the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment taxonomy...