THE CONTINGENT VALUATION OF FOREST CHARACTERISTICS - 2 EXPERIMENTS

Most work on valuing the recreational benefits of public forests has c oncentrated on estimating consumers' surplus per visit. We use two con tingent valuation approaches to try to place a value on the physical c haracteristics of British forests, and hence to explain the variation in consumers' surplus across different forest types. Our two approache s are, first, to obtain incremental willingness-to-pay to access fores ts with different levels of a number of characteristics by showing vis itors pairs of photographs; and second, to use characteristic levels a s explanatory variables in a bid curve. We find that forest characteri stics are in general poor predictors of willingness to pay.