Willingness To Pay Question Research Articles

In valuing environmental change, it is desirable to use market data, which reflect citizens' willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a better quality environment. Unfortunately, market data often are unavailable for this purpose. When this happens, WTP often is elicited from survey data. Of course, there are risks that consumers may not respond to a survey in the same manner that they respond in a real market. These risks can be reduced by framing the hypothetical context of the market as realistically as possible. In most prior applications, contingent valuation efforts have employed some variant of a direct WTP question. However, requesting survey respondents to supply a dollar value for what is probably an unfamiliar commodity inherently is problematic. In contrast, the contingent ranking procedure asks participants to compare and rank alternatives, each describing a different tradeoff between the provision of an environmental good and its price. The contingent ranking approach is employed in this paper to estimate the value of reduced exposure to diesel vehicle odors from a 1984 survey of 140 respondents in the Philadelphia area. Diesel vehicle odors are related physically to the broader mobile source particulate emissions problem. In diesel fuel combustion processes, odor-causing unburned hydrocarbons are attached to particulate byproducts. Since particle removal technologies contribute in varying degrees to odor reduction, policies to reduce mobile source particulate emissions will provide the additional benefit of reducing the diesel odor nuisance type of externality. Given the pervasive nature of the diesel odor problem, even values to avoid a single odor contact of a few cents can amount in the aggregate to many millions of dollars. Thus, the benefit of odor reduction could be comparable to the magnitude of other health and welfare benefits associated with control of mobile source particulate emissions.'

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