comparing alternative models of heterogeneity in consumer choice behavior summary when modeling demand for differentiated products it is vital to adequately capture consumer taste heterogeneity but there is no clearly preferred approach here we compare the performance of six alternative models currently the most popular are mixed logit mixl particularly the version with normal mixing n mixl and latent class lc which assumes discrete consumer types recently several alternative models have been developed the generalized multinomial logit g mnl extends n mixl by allowing for heterogeneity in the logit scale coefficient scale heterogeneity logit s mnl is a special case of g mnl with scale heterogeneity only the mixed mixed logit mm mnl assumes a discrete mixture of normals heterogeneity distribution finally one can modify n mixl by imposing theoretical sign constraints on vertical attributes we call this t mixl we find that none of these models dominates the others but g mnl mm mnl and t mixl typically outperform the popular n mixl and lc models copyright 2012 john wiley sons ltd

the generalized multinomial logit model accounting for scale and coefficient heterogeneity the mixed or heterogeneous multinomial logit mixl model has become popular in a number of fields especially marketing health economics and industrial organization in most applications of the model the vector of consumer utility weights on product attributes is assumed to have a multivariate normal mvn distribution in the population thus some consumers care more about some attributes than others and the iia property of multinomial logit mnl is avoided i e segments of consumers will tend to switch among the subset of brands that possess their most valued attributes the mixl model is also appealing because it is relatively easy to estimate recently however some researchers have argued that the mvn is a poor choice for modelling taste heterogeneity they argue that much of the heterogeneity in attribute weights is accounted for by a pure scale effect i e across consumers all attribute weights are scaled up or down in tandem this implies that choice behaviour is simply more random for some consumers than others i e holding attribute coefficients fixed the scale of their error term is greater this leads to a scale heterogeneity mnl model s mnl here we develop a generalized multinomial logit model g mnl that nests s mnl and mixl by estimating the s mnl mixl and g mnl models on 10 data sets we provide evidence on their relative performance we find that models that account for scale heterogeneity i e g mnl or s mnl are preferred to mixl by the bayes and consistent akaike information criteria in all 10 data sets accounting for scale heterogeneity enables one to account for extreme consumers who exhibit nearly lexicographic preferences as well as consumers who exhibit very random behaviour in a sense we formalize below

modelling unobserved heterogeneity in contingent valuation of health risks human preferences for alternative levels of health risks can be heterogeneous in this paper a flexible distribution approach to model health values elicited with the dichotomous choice contingent valuation method is considered rigid parametric structures cannot model sample heterogeneity while imposing strong assumptions on the error distribution a mixture of normal distributions is considered which can approximate arbitrary well any empirical distributions as the number of mixtures increases the model is applied to data on willingness to pay for reducing the individual risk of an episode of respiratory illness the mixture distribution model is compared with the rigid probit model using a bayes factor test the results show that the mixture modelling approach improves performance while allowing for the consideration of alternative groups of individuals with different preferences for health risks

a probabilistic choice model for market segmentation and elasticity structure marketing scholars commonly characterize market structure by studying the patterns of substitution implied by brand switching though the approach is useful it typically ignores the destabilizing

tariffs with private information and reputation abstract several tariff games are examined in which the home country has private information about whether its government is a low or high tariff type if the foreign government is uncertain about this type in a one shot game its nash equilibrium tariff will be lower higher than if it knew the home government were a low high tariff type in two multistage games misleading behavior by the home government is an equilibrium strategy for sufficiently high discount factors whether or not uncertainty is persistent is important for welfare results tariff rules do not necessarily dominate discretionary policy in these models

the optimality of tariff quotas under uncertainty abstract a tariff quota is a schedule of tariffs in which the tariff rate steps upward as imports exceed some critical quantity or value this has desirable properties in the face of uncertainty about domestic demand and supply and about foreign supply we show that a specific ad valorem tariff quota is the policy maximizing domestic expected surplus subject to constraints on average imports import expenditure and on the average amount by which imports import expenditure exceed some critical value

incentive compatible trade policies a two country trade model with production uncertainty is considered if complete contingent markets do not exist it is desirable for governments to adopt some trade policies to share the production risk a full information policy involves incomes transfers across countries which can be achieved by equal import tariffs and export subsidies with incomplete information we consider incentive compatible trade policies which are designed to be truth revealing while partially sharing the production risk in this case the tariff in one country may differ from the export subsidy abroad

optimal bid selection for dichotomous choice contingent valuation surveys abstract this paper develops a model for optimal survey design for the dichotomous choice contingent valuation method that finds the bid amounts as well as the sample sizes corresponding to each bid the model uses an iterative procedure to select the survey design that minimizes the mean square error of the welfare measure a set of monte carlo simulations shows that the model produces significantly lower mean squared errors for the welfare estimate than the next best model produces survey design under alternative assumptions regarding the statistical distribution of the welfare measure is also addressed the model produced significantly different survey designs depending on whether the distribution was assumed to be symmetric or asymmetric

effect of distance on the preservation value of water quality in the past dozen years an extensive body of literature has developed on the willingness to pay for water quality in particular its recreation use and nonuse preservation values this paper illustrates a procedure for estimating the effect of distance on the preservation value of environmental quality using the contingent valuation approach the case considered is the potential degradation of water quality due to coal mining activity in the flathead river drainage system montana the analysis supports a negative association for this particular study area the effect of distance on preservation value was considered both directly and indirectly through its effect on visits 36 references 2 tables

the aggregation of environmental benefit values welfare measures distance decay and total wtp abstract we review the literature regarding the aggregation of benefit value estimates for non market goods two case studies are presented through which we develop an approach to aggregation which applies the spatial analytic capabilities of a geographical information system to combine geo referenced physical census and survey data to estimate a spatially sensitive valuation function these case studies show that the common reliance upon political rather than economic jurisdictions and the use of sample mean values within the aggregation process are liable to lead to significant errors in resultant values we also highlight the fact that for resources with use values then we should expect overall values to reduce with increasing distance from such sites but that changes in the choice of welfare measure will determine whether such distance decay is to be expected within values stated by those who are presently non users the paper concludes by providing recommendations for future improvements to the methodology

trading responses to food market liberalization in tanzania abstract trading has been the only marketing function in tanzania to shift rapidly and efficiently from parastatal institutions to private institutions private traders have made a major contribution to the movement of maize from producing areas including to some extent remote surplus areas to urban consumer centres and to consumer price stabilization traders however do not keep interseasonal stocks and do not own means of transport there are very few or no barriers to entering the maize market but there is evidence of barriers to expansion above certain business levels larger traders may benefit from economies of scale in the form of lower transport costs and lower purchasing prices this article identifies the following as primary factors in accelerating the development of private trading the development of marketplaces and storage structures access to credit facilities for both traders and transporters and long term infrastructural policies to reduce transport costs

the effect of distance on willingness to pay values a case study of wetlands and salmon in california most contingent valuation studies in the literature utilized a pre determined geographic market area for their sample frame in other words they did not include variables that would measure the extent of the geographic areas over which to aggregate willingness to pay these studies implicitly assumed that the effects of geographic distance were moot an assumption that could have led to an understatement of the aggregate benefit values computed in these studies the overall goal of this study was to determine if distance affects willingness to pay for public goods with large non use values the data used came from a contingent valuation study regarding the san joaquin valley ca respondents were asked about their willingness to pay wtp for three proposed programs designed to reduce various environmental problems in the valley a logit model was used to examine the effects of geographic distance on respondents willingness to pay for each of the three programs results indicate that distance affected wtp for two of the three programs wetlands habitat and wildlife and the wildlife contamination control programs we calculate the underestimate in benefits if the geographic extent of the public good market is arbitrarily limited to one political jurisdiction

does hidden information make trade liberalization more fragile this paper focuses on the impact of hidden information on strategic interaction in the context of trade agreements in the presence of informational asymmetry it is possible that a tradeoff between liberalization and sustainability of cooperation emerges it is shown that it may be optimal to agree on a degree of liberalization associated with a strictly positive ex ante probability of deviation occurring in that case cooperation will break down in finite time and the optimal degree of liberalization cannot be applied indefinitely ce memoire etudie l impact de l information cachee sur l interaction strategique dans le contexte des accords de commerce quand il y a asymetrie de l information il est possible qu emerge une relation d equivalence entre la liberalisation et la viabilite de la cooperation on montre qu il peut etre optimal de s entendre sur un degre de liberalisation associea une probabilite ex ante strictement positive qu une deviation va se produire dans ce cas la cooperation va s effriter dans une periode finie et le degre optimal de liberalisation ne tient pas indefiniment

on the efficiency of green trade policy the paper derives conditions for second best environmental policy when there are foreign countries which fail to implement appropriate environmental regulations it is shown that in such cases efficiency in the global economy will not be achieved unless domestic environmental regulations are supplemented by trade provisions the result is independent of whether environmental problems are local or international furthermore when trade provisions are implemented efficiency requires that domestic environmental taxes are fixed at the pigouvian tax rate the results imply that there is an economic rationale for regulating the trade between signatories and non signatories of international environmental agreements efficient trade regulations will either take the form of trade restrictions or trade promotions depending on whether the environmental problem is created by production or consumption activities and whether the net import of the relevant commodity is positive or negative it is argued that an efficient climate agreement signed by a group of fuel importing countries e g the oecd countries should include a subsidy on the import of fossil fuels

the impact of structural adjustment programs on manufacturing lessons from nicaragua abstract since 1988 nicaragua has applied structural adjustment programs including stabilization and liberalization measures as of 1991 these measures succeeded in combating inflation but they did not lead to increased production nor to an improved trade balance the nicaraguan manufacturing sector was especially vulnerable because of a decade long lack of investment and the non market environment in which firms operated in the 1980s the combination of trade liberalization with an overvalued exchange rate and financial liberalization had in particular negative effects on manufacturing production and investment in addition specific industrial policies are necessary to increase manufacturing competitiveness

model selection for the mixed logit with bayesian estimation in this paper the mixed logit ml using bayesian methods was employed to examine willingness to pay wtp to consume bread produced with reduced levels of pesticides so as to ameliorate environmental quality from data generated by a choice experiment model comparison used the marginal likelihood which is preferable for bayesian model comparison and testing models containing constant and random parameters for a number of distributions were considered along with models in preference space and wtp space as well as those allowing for misreporting we found strong support for the ml estimated in wtp space little support for fixing the price coefficient a common practice advocated and adopted in the environmental economics literature and weak evidence for misreporting

asset markets tariffs and political risk abstract this paper examines a simple model in which exogenous political risk creates uncertainty about tariffs the model predicts a relation between consumption and tariffs that differs radically from that implied by models without asset markets or political risk given the probability distribution of tariffs domestic consumption and utility ex post are lower in states of the world with a domestic tariff and no foreign tariff than with a foreign tariff and no domestic tariff this conclusion emerges despite the fact that the opposite would be obtained in the absence of asset markets so economists should not be surprised if observed relations between consumption and tariffs differ from the predictions of static theory in either time series or cross sections

trade agreements with domestic policies as disguised protection abstract wto rules prohibit disguised protection in the form of domestic policies how then do governments cooperate over trade and domestic policies when none can verify whether a nation s domestic tax reduction is a protective measure or a reaction to a production externality in this paper each government privately observes whether a production externality associated with its import competing good is high or low this paper finds that in an optimal agreement disguised protection with domestic policies is never used by governments with a high externality and is never commonly realized moreover in an optimal agreement tariffs may be conditional on domestic policies

seeking guidelines for poverty reduction in rural zambia abstract poverty profiles typically provide policy makers with information about the characteristics of the poor without giving guidance as to the types of programs best suited for reducing poverty a method is described in this paper for extending the typical poverty profile to analyze and quantify the constraints faced by poor smallholders in rural areas the method is applied to rural zambia where poverty is widespread and deep the extension provides timely information for the design of poverty reducing policies

non users willingness to pay for a national park an application and critique of the contingent valuation method bateman i j and langford i h 1997 non users willingness to pay for a national park an application and critique of the contingent valuation method reg studies 31 571 582 a great deal of the ongoing academic debate concerning the contingent valuation cv method has focused upon whether or not the method is suitable for assessing non use values this paper presents results from a study examining non users values for preserving the norfolk broads a wetland area of recognized international importance from the threat of saline flooding discussion of results centres upon the validity of the cv method for eliciting unbiased estimates of non use value a graphical representation of findings from a variety of studies is presented to suggest that such results are logically ordered across goods and valuation scenarios however as the paper concludes logicality and validity are not necessarily synonymous bateman i j et langford i h 1997 la volonte des non usagers de payer les parcs nationaux

flexible mixture distribution modeling of dichotomous choice contingent valuation with heterogenity abstract this paper considers the performance of a model of mixture normal distributions for dichotomous choice contingent valuation data which allows the researcher to consider unobserved heterogeneity across the sample the model is flexible and approaches a semi parametric model since the normality assumption can be removed by augmenting the number of mixture distributions bayesian inference allows for simple estimation of the model and is particularly appropriate for conducting inference with finite data sets the proposed model is compared with other semi parametric and parametric approaches using monte carlo simulation under alternative assumptions regarding heteroskedasticity and heterogeneity in sample observations it is found that the mixture normal model reduces bias and improves performance with respect to an alternative semi parametric model particularly when the sample is characterized by heterogeneous preferences the application of the model to empirical data on the recreational value of natural areas in the canary islands confirmed the expected results

liberalization and privatization in tanzania and zambia abstract poststructural adjustment policies currently being emphasized by the world bank international monetary fund and donors in tropical africa are liberalization and privatization of the economies in theory both of these policies will allow firms to operate more efficiently and the economy to be more competitive and market oriented this paper focuses on the short run effects of these policies how governments are initiating them and what segments of the population are benefiting losing the programs are sufficiently new in tropical africa that the literature contains little analysis a recent visit to tanzania and zambia provides the basis for this review of the experiences in these two countries

using choice experiments to value the environment this paper we outline the choice experiment approach to environmental valuation this approach has its roots in lancaster s characteristics theory of value in random utility theory and in experimental design we show how marginal values for the attributes of environmental assets such as forests and rivers can be estimated from pair wise choices as well as the value of the environmental asset as a whole these choice pairs are designed so as to allow efficient statistical estimation of the underlying utility function and to minimise required sample size choice experiments have important advantages over other environmental valuation methods such as contingent valuation and travel cost type models although many design issues remain unresolved applications to environmental issues have so far been relatively limited we illustrate the use of choice experiments with reference to a recent uk study on public preferences for alternative forest landscapes this study allows us to perform a convergent validity test on the choice experiment estimates of willingness to pay

predation reputation and entry deterrence abstract economists often argue that predatory practices are irrational since there exist cheaper or more certain means to gain or maintain a monopoly our gametheoretic equilibrium analysis suggests that if a firm is threatened by several potential entrants then predation may be rational against early entrants even if it is costly when viewed in isolation because it yields a reputation which deters other entrants asymmetric information plays a crucial role in our analysis since it provides the rationale for entrants to base their expectations of the firm s future behavior on its past actions the analysis also suggests methods to treat general reputational phenomena

the optimal tariff production lags and time consistency the optimal tariff for a large country equals the reciprocal of the foreign export elasticity of supply however if production decisions occur before consumption decisions the ex ante optimal tariff is not time consistent because the ex post elasticity is less than the ex ante elasticity we show all countries are worse off if the large country cannot precommit to its ex ante optimal tariff and that all countries can gain if the large country taxes domestic production of importables

the economic benefits of reducing the environmental effects of landfills heterogeneous distance decay effects this paper estimates the economic benefits of different alternative policies considered for reducing the external effects caused by the utilization of landfills in solid waste management the preferences of the local population in the surrounding areas of a landfill are evaluated utilizing a discrete choice experiment in which subjects are presented with alternative policy decisions that involve reducing the material processed through the landfill various models were employed in order to capture heterogeneous preferences resulting in a mixture of normals modelling approach mn mnl outperforming other alternative models of heterogeneity the results show that the policy of moving the landfill away from the population does not provide the most benefits when compared to a policy of increasing recycling in the household the economic benefits of the waste management policies are heterogeneous across the population surrounding the landfill and so the distance decay functions thus the economic benefits for most waste management policies can increase or decrease the further away the subject lives from the landfill depending on the preferences of his her segment and the type of policy employed

a conjectural variation approach to strategic tariff equilibria abstract this paper examines tariff equilibria in a static two country trade model under a general class of conjectures regarding foreign retaliation we assume that each country chooses its optimum tariff given some conjecture in this class and derive the associated conjectural tariff equilibrium which can be thought of as a nash equilibrium conditional on each country s conjecture about how the foreign country will retaliate our main contribution is to show that when marginal propensities to consume imports are sufficiently small increased expectation of retaliation results in lower equilibrium tariffs for both countries since countries in general probably do expect some retaliation it therefore appears that the traditional cournot nash analysis probably overstates the trade restrictiveness of tariff wars

risk aversion and optimal trade restrictions if the representative consumer of a country is risk averse then the choice of trade controls must take account of their effects on the fluctuations of domestic real income if the world price of the importable is uncertain and risk aversion is high then the optimal policy for achieving a ceiling on expected imports involves a reduction in imports and a rise in the domestic price as the world price falls moreover a quota is superior to a tariff in achieving the ceiling under domestic uncertainty a tariff is superior to a quota but it could be optimal to reduce the domestic price as imports increase economists have long recognized the equivalence of price and quantity controls under certainty the comparison of these control modes and the characterization of the optimal form of control under uncertainty has been undertaken by two groups of authors weitzman 1974 1978 considered a planning authority which faces uncertainty about the costs and benefits of producing a good he showed that the ranking of price and quantity controls depends on the curvature of the cost and benefit functions and that an optimal policy can be considered as a mixture of price and quantity controls his work was developed by laffont 1977 ireland 1977 malcomson 1978 and yohe 1978 in the context of international trade the comparison of tariffs and quotas under uncertainty has been undertaken by fishelson and flatters 1975 pelcovits 1976 dasgupta and stiglitz 1977 young 1979 1980a b and helpman and razin 1980 recently young and anderson 1980 showed that the policy maximizing expected consumer s surplus given a constraint on expected imports expected import expenditure is a specific tariff an ad valorem tariff in contrast to weitzman s planning model the price instrument is superior to the quantity instrument whatever the curvature of the benefits function 2 the conclusion of young and anderson appears to provide a strong argument against using quantity instruments to restrict trade however the expected surplus criterion is a valid welfare measure only if the marginal utility of income is constant in this paper we characterize the optimal form of trade restriction if the representative consumer of the importing country exhibits risk aversion toward income fluctuations the optimal policy can have surprising properties properties which with high risk aversion are better approximated by a quota rather than a tariff hence the second best justification for using quantity controls to restrict trade turns out to depend on

can defaults save the climate evidence from a field experiment on carbon offsetting programs individual preferences for environmental policies can be influenced by the frame in which choices and decisions are presented in this paper we present results of a field experiment on the contributions to carbon offsetting programs under two alternative treatments for the default option the opt in treatment asked subjects to pay for the policy proposal while the opt out treatment asked subjects if they wanted to be excluded from payment for the policy proposal the results show that the frame of the default option had a significant effect on the amount of money paid for the policy proposal subjects were more likely to accept the policy proposal if the default option was the opt out treatment the results have implications for the design of environmental policies

municipal waste kuznets curves evidence on socio economic drivers and policy effectiveness from the eu waste generation and waste disposal are becoming increasingly prominent in the environmental arena from a policy perspective and in the context of delinking analysis in general waste generation is still increasing proportionally with income and economic and environmental costs associated to landfilling are also increasing this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of waste generation incineration and landfill dynamics based on panel data for the eu25 to assess the effects of different drivers economic structural policy and the eventual differences between western and eastern eu countries we show that for waste generation there is still no waste kuznets curve wkc trend although elasticity to income drivers appears lower than in the past landfill and other policy effects do not seem to provide backward incentives for waste prevention and in terms of landfill and incineration as expected they are respectively decreasing and increasing with policy acting as a strong driver eastern countries appear to be performing generally quite well thus benefiting from eu membership and related policies in terms of environmental performance we can conclude that although absolute delinking is far from being achieved for waste generation there are some first positive signs of an increasing relative delinking for waste generation and robust landfill diversion and varying evidence of a significant role of the eu waste policies implemented in the late 1990s and early 2000s our evidence suggests that if while landfill diversion is currently associated to a delinking partly explained by eu policies waste prevention must be the next objective of waste regulation efforts

multi lateral trade negotiations and the most favored nation clause abstract this paper considers the interaction between private information and the most favored nation clause in trade negotiations it demonstrates that by aggregating uncertainty over a number of trading partners the most favored nation clause may offer a welfare improvement over a set of bilateral trade negotiations this improvement is shown to be most pronounced when a large number of countries are involved in negotiations

using choice question formats to determine compensable values the case of a landfill siting process abstract siting noxious facilities such as community landfills is a challenging problem for local planners who recognize the importance of economic efficiency and equity political acceptance and meeting federal regulatory standards meeting these criteria requires technical and socio economic analyses in conjunction with public input planners may also recognize that political acceptance requires compensation for the host community either in the form of monetary or in kind transfers following breffle and rowe breffle w s rowe r d 2002 comparing choice question formats for evaluating natural resource tradeoffs land econ 78 2 298 314 we use a resource to resource paired comparison survey method to estimate compensatory values associated with an in county landfill for both the host and non host communities our results indicate that while a host community household s minimum willingness to accept payment for hosting a landfill may exceed a non host community household s maximum willingness to pay a large difference in population sizes between the two communities enables the landfill to pass a kaldor potential compensation test

income effects and the inconvenience of private provision of public goods for bads the case of recycling in finland abstract absent or weak income effects reported in many contingent valuation studies have cast doubt on the reliability of the survey method we find that the income effect depends on the type of public good in question there is a negative income effect for willingness to pay for recycling which requires time and effort for sorting but a positive effect for the more convenient incineration hence high income low income individuals may display less more effort on environmental behavior this stresses the importance of comprehensive distributional analyses when assessing alternative environmental policies

tariffs as insurance optimal commercial policy when domestic markets are incomplete free trade is not optimal for a small country that faces uncertain terms of trade if some factors are immobile ex post and markets for contingent claims are incomplete the government can improve social welfare by using commercial policy that serves as a partial substitute for missing insurance markets using a combination of analytical and simulation techniques we demonstrate that optimal policy for this purpose will often have an anti trade bias we also show that the usual preference by economists for factor or product taxes and subsidies over tariffs and export subsidies may not be justified in this context this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

heterogeneous preferences for community recycling programs this paper examines household preferences for community recycling programs which have both public and private good dimensions the data come from a survey conducted in seattle wa which elicited stated preference contingent ratings for different recycling programs relative to status quo with experimental variation in the overall community recycling rate achieved and expected household cost the recycling rate is interpreted as capturing the public benefits of recycling programs and constitutes the most common measure used by policy agencies for setting waste management objectives and evaluating policy initiatives the analysis begins with fixed parameter models that explore different ways of handling rating data and mixed logit estimations that capture household preference heterogeneity both within and across different recycling programs this analysis yields unique estimates of willingness to pay for an increase in the community recycling rate predicted individual specific utility parameters are then regressed on household background information to explicitly examine the nature of preference heterogeneity overall this paper generates interpretable policy relevant insights into the public and private good dimensions of community recycling programs

a theory of trade concessions abstract we present a model of tariff disputes and concessions consisting of an infinitely repeated game under bilateral incomplete information given potential agreements to be reached through unilateral or reciprocal concessions we find that an agreement involving reciprocal concessions is reached immediately if the discount factor is large and or the volume of trade is small otherwise prior beliefs about country type matter when both countries hold pessimistic priors immediate reciprocal concessions still occur very different prior beliefs lead to an immediate unilateral concession of the pessimistic country whereas optimistic priors coupled with low discount factors may generate delayed agreements 1997 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

testing the influence of substitute sites in nature valuation by using spatial discounting factors this paper investigates the effect of nearby nature substitute sites on preferences for nature restoration contrary to prior studies we use a respondent centric approach to control for substitute sites we assess each respondent specific spatial context by computing densities of nature substitute sites within various ranges from each respondent s home this approach considers the use and non use values of nature together data from three similar discrete choice experiments carried out in flanders belgium are compared different spatial discounting factors are tested to explore how the substitution effect behaves with regard to distance latent class analyses are performed to account for preference heterogeneity among respondents we observe divergent behaviours across groups of respondents the distance to substitutes affects how respondents gauge substitute sites we find a significant influence of the squared average buffer distance but this effect varies in sign across case studies and classes of respondents our results demonstrate that individual specific gis data can significantly improve the representation of the spatial context and the transferability of value functions however the roles played by preference heterogeneity and nature perception on respondents capacity to value nature still deserves further attention in future research

a comparison of stated preference methods for environmental valuation this paper presents an empirical comparison of contingent valuation cvm and choice experiments which are used to value environmental quality changes both of these methods require individuals to state their preferences for environmental qualities however choice experiments differ from cvm in that environmental attributes are varied in an experimental design which requires respondents to make repeated choices between bundles of attributes the empirical application involved the effect of environmental quality changes arising from forest management practices on recreational moose hunting values significant differences were found between the values derived from the two methods however detailed examination of the implied choice behaviour suggested that respondents ignored substitute recreation areas in the cvm question restricting the choice experiment model to consider only the one site where quality was varied resulted in welfare estimates similar to the cvm model this highlights the importance of substitutes in environmental valuation and suggests that choice experiments may be more appropriate than cvm in some cases