Estimating Willingness to Pay for Alpine Pastures: A Discrete Choice Experiment Accounting for Attribute Non-Attendance

Abstract

Alpine pastures generate important ecosystem services, some closely related to the environment, others to historical and cultural aspects. The economic valuation of these services helps their recognition in public policies, thus encouraging their conservation and improvement. Discrete Choice Experiments are particularly useful in estimating ecosystem services as they allow the evaluation of each individual ecosystem service, allowing for policy modulation. However, preferences and willingness to pay may be influenced by some heuristics that respondents adopt when making their choices. The present study contributes to the Attribute-Non-Attendance (ANA) literature by analyzing the effect of serial ANA on WTP for the improvement of the ecosystem services of an Alpine pasture, the Entrelor pasture located in Val d’Aosta (North-West Italy). The novelty of this study is that we investigated ANA by asking a first group of respondents which attributes were ignored during choices, and a second group which attributes they considered. Our results show that considering ANA matters in DCE. In particular, framing the question positively (which attributes were attended) yields differences in marginal WTPs that are significantly and systematically higher for all the attributes. Conversely, with negative framing, differences in marginal WTP seem to be insignificant and unstable both in terms of magnitude and sign. Moreover, positively framing the ANA question can be more informative, as ANA appears more frequently. These results suggest that respondents probably do not feel judged for not having adopted the expected degree of attention with a positively framed ANA question.