Wetland ecosystems on privately owned farms – such as those on the Murrumbidgee River Floodplain in the state of New South Wales, Australia – provide a mix of potentially valuable outputs to their owners and the wider community. The mix of values generated is dependent on the biophysical...

Choosing a mechanism to encourage landholders to change their land management inorder to deliver environmental outcomes is a complicated process. Careful instrumentselection may count for little if uptake and adoption are insufficient to meetperformance targets. Similarly, investors may require...

Irrigated agriculture often leads to recharge to local and regional groundwater systems greater than what the systems can absorb, resulting in the development of shallow watertables causing salinity and waterlogging. Policy based on emissions trading offers one option for effective management of...

A range of empirical approaches to representing preference heterogeneity have emerged in choice modelling. Researchers have been able to explore the differences which selection of a particular approach makes to welfare measures in a particular dataset, and indeed have been able to implement a...

AbstractThe objective of this thesis is to investigate the preferences of individuals for the management of upland landscapes in the UK. Environmental valuation techniques are becoming an increasingly important tool in the development of environmental management policy, however, they are not...

This paper is concerned with the empirical relationship between biodiversity conservation valuesand income. We use random effects panel models to examine the effects of income, and then GDPper capita, on willingness to pay for habitat and biodiversity conservation. In a meta-analysis,...

This thesis addresses the problems associated with security of the electricity supply in the UK. The British electricity supply industry has experienced a significant structural change. Competition has been brought into the electricity industry and a single wholesale electricity market of Great...

Should we give equal weight to all responses in a choice experiment? Previous Choice Modelling papers have considered the issue of the internal consistency of choices – such as the extent to which strictly-dominated options are chosen. In this paper, a different focus is employed, namely the...

Despite the vital role of the utility function in welfare measurement, the implications of working with incorrect utility specifications have been largely neglected in the choice experiments literature. This paper addresses the importance of specification with a special emphasis on the effects...

Recent work by Kahneman and others has led to a new focus in economics on a wellbeing-based approach to utility. This suggests that ‘experienced utility’ is an alternative and more appropriate basis for the measurement of economic value compared with ‘decision utility’. In this paper, we...