Poprawność motywacyjna w metodach wyceny opartych na preferencjach deklarowanych

Rozprawa składa się z ośmiu artykułów naukowych poświęconych tematyce ujawniania prawdziwych preferencji w ankietach wyceny stosujących metody preferencji deklarowanych. Zaprezentowane artykuły wykorzystują szerokie spektrum podejść badawczych w celu analizy zagadnienia. Obejmują one dogłębny przegląd literatury empirycznie weryfikującej poprawność oszacowań pochodzących z metod preferencji deklarowanych, model teoretyczny obrazujący znaczenie warunku konsekwencyjności, a także badania laboratoryjne i terenowe, które skupiają się na poszczególnych aspektach poprawności motywacyjnej ankiet. Pierwsze cztery artykuły koncentrują się wokół kwestii konsekwencyjności. Kolejne cztery dotyczą formatu pytań wykorzystywanych do zbierania informacji o preferencjach respondentów. Główne pytanie badawcze, leżące u podstaw każdego z artykułów, to, czy, a jeśli tak, to w jaki sposób, metody oparte na preferencjach deklarowanych mogą dawać prawidłowe oszacowania faktycznych wartości dóbr nierynkowych

Information, consequentiality and credibility in stated preference surveys: A choice experiment on climate adaptation

Information provided in valuation surveys has been shown to afect stated preferences, which in turn may matter for the validity and reliability of survey-based value estimates. Although information efects are widely documented in stated preference studies, the reasons underlying the efects are less established. We focus on information about the policy context of the valuation scenario and examine two pathways which may help explain how including such information in a survey afects stated preferences. We hypothesize and empirically analyze whether the information efects on stated preferences can emerge as a result of changed perceptions about (1) the survey consequentiality and (2) the credibility of the valuation scenario upon facing the additional information. Our results confrm that the frequently found information efects can be present in the context of urban green and climate adaptation. The role of the additional information appears to be negligible for consequentiality perceptions. In contrast, the additional information strengthens the perceived credibility, and this may partially explain the information efects on stated preferences. We conclude that stated preference research may beneft from an increased attention to perceived credibility of the valuation scenario

Will a government find it financially easier to neutralize a looming protest if more groups are involved?

We study a policy response to an increase in post-merger social stress. If a merger of groups of people is viewed as a revision of their social space, then the merger alters people’s comparators and increases social stress: the social stress of a merged population is greater than the sum of the levels of social stress of the constituent populations when apart. We use social stress as a proxy measure for looming social protest. As a response to the post-merger increase in social stress, we consider a policy aimed at reversing the negative effect of the merger by bringing the social stress of the merged population back to the sum of the pre- merger levels of social stress of the constituent populations when apart. We present, in the form of an algorithm, a cost-effective policy response which is publicly financed and does not reduce the incomes of the members of the merged population. We then compare the financial cost of implementing such a policy when the merger involves more or fewer groups. We show that the cost may fall as the number of merging groups rises

Gender differentiation in risk-taking behavior: On the relative risk aversion of single men and single women

We relate an observed difference between single men (SM) and single women (SW) in attitudes towards risk to the higher value assigned to social status by SM than by SW. In the marriage market, low status carries a harsher penalty for SM than for SW because when selecting a partner, the social status of a man is more important to a woman than the social status of a woman is to a man. Correlating social status with relative wealth, we show how intensified distaste at experiencing low relative wealth reduces relative risk aversion

An adverse social welfare effect of a doubly gainful trade

Acknowledging individuals’ distaste for low relative income renders trade less appealing when trade is viewed as a technology that integrates economies by merging separate social spheres into one. We define a “trembling trade” as a situation in which gains from trade are overtaken by losses of relative income, with the result that global social welfare is reduced. A constructive example reveals that a “trembling trade” can arise even when trade is doubly gainful in that it increases the income of every individual and narrows the income gap between the trading populations

Understanding the distribution of economic benefits from improving coastal and marine ecosystems

The study was carried out within the project “Good environmental status through regional coordination and capacity building” (GES-REG) funded by the Central Baltic INTERREG IV A Programme 2007–2013. MC acknowledges the support of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the National Science Centre of Poland (project 2015/19/D/HS4/01972). SS thanks the project “Development of the ships' ballast water management system to reduce biological invasions” (BALMAN, 2015–2017) for funding her work. NH thanks MASTS (HR09011) (www.masts.ac.uk) for funding a part of his work.The ecological status of coastal and marine waterbodies world-wide is threatened by multiple stressors, including nutrient inputs from various sources and increasing occurrences of invasive alien species. These stressors impact the environmental quality of the Baltic Sea. Each Baltic Sea country contributes to the stressors and, at the same time, is affected by their negative impacts on water quality. Knowledge about benefits from improvements in coastal and marine waters is key to assessing public support for policies aimed at achieving such changes. We propose a new approach to account for variability in benefits related to differences in socio-demographics of respondents, by using a structural model of discrete choice. Our method allows to incorporate a wide range of socio-demographics as explanatory variables in conditional multinomial logit models without the risk of collinearity; the model is estimated jointly and hence more statistically efficient than the alternative, typically used approaches. We apply this new technique to a study of the preferences of Latvian citizens towards improvements of the coastal and marine environment quality. We find that overall, Latvians are willing to pay for reducing losses of biodiversity, for improving water quality for recreation by reduced eutrophication, and for reducing new occurrences of invasive alien species. However a significant group within the sample seems not to value environmental improvements in the Baltic Sea, and, thus, is unwilling to support costly measures for achieving such improvements. The structural model of discrete choice reveals substantial heterogeneity among Latvians towards changes in the quality of coastal and marine waters of Latvia.PostprintPeer reviewe

A Consequential Contingent Valuation Referendum: Still Not Enough to Elicit True Preferences for Public Goods!

Whether respondents disclose their preferences truthfully in surveys that are used to assess the values of public goods remains a crucial question for the practical application of stated preference methods. The literature suggests that in order to elicit true preferences, respondents should see a valuation survey as consequential: they must believe in the actual consequences that may follow from the survey result. Drawing on recent empirical findings, we develop a model depicting the importance of the consequentiality requirement for truthful preference disclosure in a survey that evaluates a public policy project based on a referendum-format value elicitation question. First, we show that a respondent’s belief that his vote may influence the outcome of the referendum plays a central role for revealing his preferences truthfully. Second, we find that the subjectively perceived probabilities of the successful provision of the public good and of the collection of the payment related to the project implementation not only need to be positive but also to be in a particular relationship with each other. This relationship varies in respondents’ preferences towards risk