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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 24th Aug 2026, 01:53:39am WEST

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Daily Overview

Session

Valuing Ecosystem Services
Location: B131
Session Chair: Michael Omonitan, University of Warsaw

Presentation 4

Choice realism, task independence, and opt-out awareness in discrete choice experiments: Implications for willingness to pay for recreation trip attributes

Ewa Zawojska¹, Michael Omonitan¹, Katarzyna Skrzypek¹, Patrick Lloyd-Smith²

1: University of Warsaw, Poland; 2: University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Discussant: Darragh Corcoran (University of Galway)

Stated preference discrete choice experiments (DCEs) allow for valuing tourism and recreation experiences, by providing data for estimating willingness to pay (WTP) for specific trip attributes. However, the credibility of these estimates remains a concern, particularly in hypothetical settings where respondents face no real financial consequences. Recent methodological advances in environmental economics have demonstrated that information scripts, designed to align respondent beliefs with key behavioral assumptions, can significantly improve the validity of WTP estimates. Yet similar methodological advances have received limited attention in tourism and recreation contexts. This study applies and adapts information script treatments to examine whether reinforcing three fundamental DCE assumptions (choice realism, task independence, and opt-out awareness) affects WTP estimates for mountain hiking trip attributes in Poland using a discrete choice experiment (DCE) administered to 2131 Polish residents; all of whom had taken a hiking trip in the Polish mountains within the past three years. The information treatment significantly affected WTP estimates, though effects varied across attributes. Most notably, the treatment reduced the trip-specific constant (interpreted as the base WTP for taking any trip, regardless of attributes) from 9.53 to 5.91 PLN. Treatment effects on attribute-specific WTP followed two distinct patterns. For landscape attributes such as meadows and rocks, the treatment reduced marginal WTP. In contrast, for wildlife and amenity attributes, the treatment increased marginal WTP. The travel time disutility also intensified under treatment. This study demonstrates that reinforcing fundamental DCE assumptions through repeated information scripts significantly affects WTP estimates for recreation trip attributes, and suggest that survey studies omitting similar attention to essential behavioral assumptions in DCEs may produce biased estimates characterized by inflated baseline valuations and attenuated attribute trade-offs.