Combining contingent valuation and travel cost data for the valuation of nonmarket goods

Abstract

The travel cost method (TCM) has long been used to infer the economic value of nonmarket resources and public goods. More recently, contingent valuation (CVM) survey methods have gained popularity for eliciting these values. Here, CVM survey responses are combined with TCM data on actual market behavior to estimate jointly both the parameters of the underlying utility function and its corresponding ordinary demand function. This is a prototypical empirical example of a new modeling strategy, variants of which should prove useful in many applications, especially where reliance on a single valuation method is undesirable.