those individuals who are favorably disposed toward paying for environmental public goods and those from higher income households. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords
:
Contingent valuation; Protest responses; Willingness to pay; Attitude toward paying; Stormwater pollution; Water quality
1. Introduction
In contingent valuation CV surveys, there is often a proportion of individuals who are not
willing to pay to obtain avoid an increase de- crease in some attribute of a particular environ-
mental public good. Some of these respondents may feel that they can’t afford to pay andor that
they do not value the public good change. Re- spondents might also hold other beliefs that
protest some aspect of the valuation process. These reasons for not paying may include insuffi-
cient information, dissension regarding the pro- posed means of bringing about the change in the
public good e.g. the payment vehicle, pollution abatement intervention, etc., an ethical objection
to the idea of placing valued environmental ob- jects in a market context, andor beliefs that
paying for environmental quality is the responsi- bility of government rather than individual
citizens.
Protest beliefs are representative of attitudes toward the valuation process Jorgensen and
Syme, 1995; Jorgensen et al., 1999. The most obvious aspect of CV is the assumption that
people should pay if they value the change in the public good. Given this assumption, certain rea-
sons why people won’t pay become problematic Lindsey, 1994; Soderqvist, 1998. For example,
others have noted that there is a problem with refusals to pay that are indicative of some reason
not associated with a lack of value for the public good change Halstead et al., 1992; Lindsey, 1994
and an inability to pay Soderqvist, 1998.
In practice, the distinction between beliefs about refusing to pay for environmental public
goods is not straightforward. Individuals who will not pay because of a lack of ability may also
believe that the valuation process is objectionable in some manner. For example, beliefs about one’s
ability to pay for stormwater pollution abatement were associated with attitudes toward paying that
reflected the fairness of the act and equity con- cerns Jorgensen et al., 1999.
Currently, CV practitioners identify those who will not pay, scrutinize their reasons, reject those
that do not fit with an economic interpretation of value, and then offer the end product as a basis
for policy decisions. However, many people who do intend to pay may also not like the WTP
question, or feel that they cannot really afford to pay. If respondents’ answers to the WTP question
are to be censored, the criteria should be indepen- dent of the payment offered Jorgensen and Syme,
1995.
If practitioners are to censor refusals to pay, they have to demonstrate that the practice is
independent of the willingness to pay WTP question format, the distribution of ‘legitimate’
reasons, variables external to the valuation pro- cess e.g. income, and the WTP response. If
censoring one type of response results in a biased sample, then all claims for generalizability on the
basis of representative sampling are forgone. In such cases, the aggregate WTP value only has
significance for the sample from which it was generated.
When practitioners censor certain reasons for refusing to pay, assumptions are made about the
meaning of those WTP responses. CV research has not embraced questions regarding the mean-
ing of environmental objects and the process of valuation Jorgensen, 1999.
2. Understanding protest beliefs as attitudes toward paying for public goods
