STATED PREFERENCE APPROACHES FOR MEASURING PASSIVE USE VALUES - CHOICE EXPERIMENTS AND CONTINGENT VALUATION

The measurement of passive use values has become an important issue in environmental economics. In this paper we examine an extension or var iant of contingent valuation, the choice experiment, which employs a s eries of questions with more than two alternatives that are designed t o elicit responses that allow the estimation of preferences over attri butes of an environmental state. We also combine the information from choice experiments and contingent valuation to test for differences in preferences and error variances arising from the two methods. Our res ults show that choice experiments have considerable merit in measuring passive use values.