Stated preference approaches for measuring passive use values: Choice experiments and contingent valuation

The measurement of passive use values has become an important issue in environmental economics. In this paper we examine an extension or variant of contingent valuation, the choice experiment, which employs a series of questions with more than two alternatives that are designed to elicit responses that allow the estimation of preferences over attributes of an environmental state. We also combine the information from choice experiments and contingent valuation to test for differences in preferences and error variances arising from the two methods. Our results show that choice experiments have considerable merit in measuring passive use values.