Revealed Willingness to Pay for Leisure

Abstract

In this paper, a new theoretical construct, the revealed willingness to pay for leisure, is presented as a link between two of the most powerful time use models that are aimed at understanding time allocation and valuing time: the microeconomic utility theory approach and the structural equations modeling method. This link is achieved by formulating a structural equations model (SEM) that keeps the generic features of the approach as applied to time use modeling but improves the incorporation of expenses in addition to activities and socioeconomic variables. The new equation on expenses in a leisure activity permits the calculation of a revealed willingness to pay for leisure, which the authors show to differ theoretically from the value of leisure that emerges from a micro-economic formulation (value of time as a resource). Using the same data from Santiago, Chile, the authors estimate both the SEM and the system of equations for working time, for the time allocated to a leisure activity, and for the expenses associated to a leisure activity, by following a micro-economic formulation. The authors confirm the theoretical derivations and conclude that the SEM does not permit the calculation of the full value of leisure and that the microeconomic approach needs an explicit constraint relating goods consumption and time use for an improved estimation of a most important component of the value of travel time savings.