We review a wide selection of published papers that rely on stated preference methods to reveal the tradeoffs that people are willing to make to protect either individual wild bird species, categories of species (guilds), or the habitats upon which these species rely. We focus on the features of these studies that make them more or less suitable for 'benefits-function transfer,' where the policy-related usefulness of the original research can be multiplied by transferring the estimated models to predict benefits associated with other types of wild birds in other regions.
Some outdoor recreation activities are regulated and require participants to have a permit or license (e.g., hunting and fishing). However, wildlife watching—and especially birdwatching—is a non-consumptive activity that requires no permit or license and thus leaves few formal data trails. Crowd-sourced data with associated volunteered geographic information, gathered by a variety of citizen/community science projects and social media platforms, can complement the information about non-consumptive activities provided by standard administrative datasets.
A set of guidelines for SP studies that is more comprehensive than that of the original National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Blue Ribbon Panel on contingent valuation, is more germane to contemporary applications, and reflects the two decades of research since that time.
Economic researchers often require monetized values of households' willingness to pay for reductions in risks to human life and health. Compared to valuing reductions in the risk of death, there is a smaller literature on valuing reductions in morbidity risks. I compare the requirements for environmental benefit-cost analysis with the limitations of the standard approaches taken in cost-effectiveness analysis in health economics, and I highlight some areas that are ripe for further research.
We review the discussion at a workshop whose goal was to achieve a better integration among behavioral, economic, and statistical approaches to choice modeling. The workshop explored how current approaches to the specification, estimation, and application of choice models might be improved to better capture the diversity of processes that are postulated to explain how consumers make choices.
We describe recent progress in several areas related to endogeneity, including choice set formation and attention to attributes, interactions among decision-makers, respondents' strategic behavior in answering stated preference choices, models of multiple discrete/continuous choice, distributions of willingness-to-pay, and methods for handling traditionally endogenous explanatory variables.
We suggest that "unobserved heterogeneity" is only one component of unobserved variability. Empirical research that suggests that random components are unlikely to be independent of systematic components, and random component variances are unlikely to be constant between or within individuals, time periods, locations, etc. We also review evidence that random components are functions of systematic components. We recommend caution in the use and interpretation of complex choice model specifications (in particular, random-parameter models).