Introduction to Attribute-Based Stated Choice Methods

摘要

Several major environmental statutes enacted in the 1970s designate resource management agencies as trustees of the natural resources on behalf of the public, and enable the trustees to recover damages for injuries to public resources from releases of hazardous substances and discharges of oil. The standard measure of damages in the various statutes is the cost of restoring the resources to baseline conditions ('primary restoration') plus compensation for the interim loss of resources from the time of the incident until full recovery from the injuries. Though the measure of damages for interim losses was originally characterized in terms of monetary compensation, trustees are only allowed to spend their damage recoveries on enhancing or creating ('restoring, rehabilitating, replacing or acquiring the equivalent of') natural resources. The statutory restriction on the use of the recoveries has motivated the development of an alternative resource compensation measure of damages for interim losses -- the cost of 'compensatory restoration' actions that provide sufficient resources and services to compensate for the losses. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) incorporated the resource compensation measure in its 1996 regulations implementing the natural resource liability provisions of OPA. Under the new rule, the focus of the analysis becomes identifying and evaluating the attributes of environmental resources (and the services they provide) at both the injury and replacement resource sites. Current methods of environmental valuation can be categorized as Revealed Preference methods (RP) and Stated Preference methods (SP). In this paper we focus on 'Attribute Based Stated Choice Methods,' since these methods have not been employed in environmental valuation to a great degree and they may be of significant value in resource compensation cases. However, it should be noted that if price or 'tax' is the only attribute being considered in an Attribute Based Stated Choice Task, then the task essentially collapses to a referendum contingent valuation situation. In the remainder of this paper when we refer to Stated Choice Methods we are referring to Attribute Based Stated Choice Methods, recognizing that referendum contingent valuation can be considered a subset of this approach. Furthermore, this reveals that many of the issues surrounding referendum contingent valuation also affect Stated Choice Methods. However, we will focus on outlining Stated Choice Methods and concentrate on differences between these methods and traditional contingent valuation methods.