Estimating willingness-to-pay for a livestock vaccine among the marginalized: The role of reflective thought in discrete choice experiments

Abstract

The management of livestock diseases transmission is dependent on the effectiveness of livestock health institutions, livestock disease monitoring and reporting mechanisms, and the management of livestock markets. The relative weakness of such institutions and mechanisms in Low-Middle Income Countries increases the importance of livestock owners’ livestock disease prevention choices. Understanding private demand for preventative disease measures is, therefore, all the more important. The accurate estimation of hypothetical demand for new livestock vaccines is important for policy makers, although challenging. The challenge relates to the nature of livestock disease and the hypothetical choice context. Individual decision making of livestock dependent households is an important mediating factor, within coupled human and natural systems, in the transmission of livestock diseases. Kenyan data (elsewhere presented) demonstrates that the stressors of a lack of rain and perceptions of financial well-being are associated with short-term changes in cognitive capacity. As a consequence, measuring and controling for various forms of choice heuristic use and changes in short-term cognitive capacity are important for robust demand analysis among marginalized populations. In estimating agro-pastoralists’ demand for new contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP) vaccines in Kenya, this paper identifies the effects of respondent short-term cognitive capacity in completing discrete choice experimental task and the subsequent effects on willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimation. Results indicate a positive estimated relationship of fluid intelligence and choice heuristics on demand for new CBPP vaccines. The estimation of WTP for CBPP disease risk information is significantly lower using WTP space estimates rather than traditional preference space estimates.