VALUATION OF RECREATIONAL BEACH QUALITY AND WATER QUALITY MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES IN OAHU

Hawaii’s pristine ocean and tropical environment is a keystone of Hawaii tourism and the state economy. Water pollution from stormwater and development threatens the beach quality to both residents and tourists. In order to understand the lost nonmarket value, we assess changes in quality of beach characteristics including water and sand quality, swimming safety conditions, and congestion using a Discrete Choice Experiment of recreational beach users. Further, we study willingness to pay (WTP) for water management strategies in Hawaii using another discrete choice experiment, including structural and nonstructural Best Management Practices, testing, monitoring, and educational efforts. Using a mixed logit model, beach quality results suggest similar preferences among resident and tourists. Both groups consistently have higher WTP to avoid poor quality levels versus obtaining excellent levels. Additionally, water quality is the single most important attribute. For the policy discrete choice experiment, both parties exhibit similar ranking of WTP to initiate water quality management strategies, with improved testing methods followed by education having the highest WTP. Lastly, we use Benefit-Cost analysis to find that all significant management strategies may be viable, since WTP is greater than the predicted cost of implementation based on expert opinion of Hawaiian policy leaders

ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES, STATED PREFERENCES, AND HYPOTHETICAL BIAS

Contingent Valuation (CV) methods are a primary tool in environmental economics to ascertain non-use or other values not observable through existing market mechanisms. Because common CV approaches typically rely on hypothetical answers from surveys in order to generate welfare estimates, these are often labelled stated preferences. Results from stated preference methods often diverge from those obtained when actual preference or behavior are involved. This divergence is commonly known as Hypothetical Bias (HB). This dissertation addresses HB as it applies to environmental applications. To begin, a meta-analysis using a sample of studies many times larger than previous works was performed. Its results identify which study protocols exacerbate HB, and which may mitigate it. Furthermore, the meta-analysis establishes the efficacy of some popular techniques to mitigate HB. The second essay focuses on understanding and addressing two important topics to environmental economics, distance decay and charismatic species conservation. These effects have not been investigated with respect to HB. We implement a field survey of monarch and viceroy butterfly conservation, creating survey treatment conditions involving both real payment and hypothetical scenarios in order to establish the extent of HB. The key finding is that while HB is present for both butterflies, HB in distance decay exists for monarchs. There is also additional HB for monarchs compared to viceroys, which we attribute to the former’s charisma. The final endeavor studies the usefulness of consequentiality, a relatively new tactic to reduce HB. Consequentiality is the degree to which respondents believe their answers may affect policy outcomes. Relying on the monarch field survey, we find that using a technique known as ex ante consequentiality may exacerbate HB. Another approach known as ex post consequentiality is more effective at reducing the extent of HB in the data. Lastly, some elements of the studies’ results showcase that HB is not always present and can also explain some of the mixed results found on the efficacy of HB mitigating methods reported in previous studies

Values for Recreational Beach Quality in Oahu, Hawaii

Pristine coastal environments are the key to Hawaii’s worldwide fame and attraction to tourists, yet their economic value remains understudied. This article examines preferences for characteristics associated with beach recreation in Oahu, Hawaii, among residents and tourists. Consideration is given to sand quality, water quality, congestion levels, and swimming safety conditions in the context of a choice experiment. The choice experiment conveys attribute levels almost entirely through pictures, and results suggest that this novel portrayal is well understood by respondents. Excessive congestion and water quality are regarded as the most important beach attributes, specifically the avoidance of poor water quality in favor of a chance to experience excellent water quality. Some evidence suggests that significantly different willingness to pay (WTP) exists among residents and tourists on Oahu with poor water quality and excellent water quality being more important to tourists, while residents place greater value on avoiding excessive congestion

US agricultural university students\u27 mental well-being and resilience during the first wave of COVID-19: Discordant expectations and experiences across genders

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic\u27s first wave led to declining mental health and life satisfaction outcomes for college students, especially women. While women in undergraduate agricultural programs outperformed men academically prior to and during the pandemic, the achievement may have come at personal cost, especially for those women with fewer personal and environmental resiliency resources. Our research objective was to expand on personal, social, and environmental factors linked with lower mental health and life satisfaction scores for students in agriculture during the pandemic. We measured the influence of such factors across gender-based mental health and life satisfaction outcomes. Our data were collected from 2030 students using an on-line survey across six land-grant university college of agriculture in agriculturally as many distinct regions of the United States. We estimated OLS and Ordered Probit models of their mental health and life satisfaction self-assessments. Our findings reveal students\u27 mental health and life satisfaction were reduced due to a paucity of personal (e.g., less future orientation or graduate school aspirations, food and housing insecurity, and personal health risks) and environmental (e.g., lower quality on-line learning experiences, isolation, family health risk, discrimination experiences) resiliency resources. Our results suggest women were more likely than men to be adversely affected by reduced resiliency resources. These findings suggest university emergency response policies need to address students\u27 needs for housing and food security, on-line course development and delivery, tele health and mental health resources, broad social inclusion and diversity to decrease risk of female attrition and support all students in agricultural degree programs

Understanding hypothetical bias: An enhanced meta-analysis

© The Author(s) 2018. The presence of hypothetical bias (HB) associated with stated preference methods has garnered frequent attention in the broad literature trying to describe and understand human behavior, often seen in environmental valuation, marketing studies, transportation choices, medical research, and others. This study presents an updated meta-analysis to explore the source of HB and methods to mitigate it. While previous meta-analysis on this topic often involves a few dozen articles, this analysis includes 131 studies after reviewing over 500 published and unpublished articles. This enables the inclusion of several important factors that have not been investigated before. These include relatively recent willingness to pay elicitation methods such as choice experiments and the Turnbull lower bound estimator. Newly emerged HB reduction techniques such as consequentiality and certainty follow-up treatments are also included. For explanatory variables that have been examined in previous studies, this analysis does not always report consistent findings. In particular, holding everything constant and contrary to commonlyheld beliefs, the method of auction does not offer much reduction to HB compared to more conventional methods such as a referendum vote. However, choice experiment, cheap talk, consequentiality and certainty follow-up all significantly contributed to explaining and mitigating the magnitude of HB. These results help practitioners to understand HB\u27s presence and choose appropriate methods for amelioration. The framework established through this study also enables future analyses targeted at understanding variations built upon one or multiple HB mitigation techniques

Application of Multiple Imputation in Dealing with Missing Data in Agricultural Surveys: The Case of BMP Adoption

Missing-data problems are common in farmer surveys but are often ignored in the literature. Conventional methods to address missing data, such as deletion and mean replacement, assume that data are missing completely at random, which rarely holds. This study compares these approaches to the multiple imputation method, which produces different parameter estimates. The mean replacement method increases the central tendency of data, leading to more significant but smaller coefficients than the other methods. We recommend using both the deletion and multiple imputation methods to deal with missing data; results generated by the mean replacement method may not be as reliable

Application of multiple imputation in dealing with missing data in agricultural surveys: The case of BMP adoption

© 2018 Western Agricultural Economics Association. Missing-data problems are common in farmer surveys but are often ignored in the literature. Conventional methods to address missing data, such as deletion and mean replacement, assume that data are missing completely at random, which rarely holds. This study compares these approaches to the multiple imputation method, which produces different parameter estimates. The mean replacement method increases the central tendency of data, leading to more significant but smaller coefficients than the other methods. We recommend using both the deletion and multiple imputation methods to deal with missing data; results generated by the mean replacement method may not be as reliable

The effect of forced choice with constant choice experiment complexity

© 2019 Western Agricultural Economics Association. In a choice experiment, when respondents are not given the opportunity to choose none of the options offered in a choice set, the choices can be considered forced. In this study of visits to Hawaiian beaches, we adopt a dual-response choice experiment that allows a comparison between forced and unforced choices while avoiding the possible confounding effect of choice set complexity found in previous research. The results suggest that individual willingness to pay is different in forced and unforced choice sets. Joint tests for parameter equality provide evidence to support the use of unforced choice designs

Public Support for Growth and Funding in Built Environments: Case of an Arboretum

This study uses a choice experiment to identify user values of potential structural improvements in a university arboretum. The survey was distributed to arboretum visitors (N=300) during Arbor Day weekend 2014. The six Choice Experiment attributes were the potential installation of a Pollinator Garden, Covered Picnic Tables, Vending Machines, and more controversially, a Perimeter Fence, a commuter Bike Path, with a monthly parking pass as the payment vehicle. These attributes were chosen to guide policy decisions for potential revenue generation (e.g. vending machines and parking) and to attract new visitors without alienating current users. It was important to choose attributes that were within the control of the arboretum. To date, we know of only one published study in the United States considering arboretum value by Downing and Roberts (1991), which used the Travel Cost Method to consider holistic values of another university’s arboretum. Results show the greatest positive WTP for the pollinator garden at $3.65 per user per month. While the bike path and perimeter fence are controversial issues in the surrounding neighborhoods, our results show a high WTP in favor of a bike path and a high WTP to avoid installing a perimeter fence. Surprisingly, respondents were also strongly against vending machines. These results provide evidence for the Arboretum leadership to make informed funding and infrastructure decisions most harmonious with public values