This paper is concerned with the use of the choice experiment method for modeling the demand for snowmobiling . The Choice Experiment includes five attributes, standard, composition, length, price day card and experience along trail. The paper estimates the snowmobile owners’ preferences and the most preferred attributes, including their will-ingness to pay for a daytrip on groomed snowmobile trail. The data consists of the an-swers from 479 registered snowmobile owners, who answered two hypothetical choice questions each. Estimating using the multinominal logit model, it is found that snow-mobilers on average are willing to pay 22.5 SEK for one day of snowmobiling on a trail with quality described as skidded every 14th day. Furthermore, it is found that the WTP increases with the quality of trail grooming. The result of this paper can be used as a yardstick for snowmobile clubs wanting to develop their trail net worth, organizations and companies developing snowmobiling as a recreational activities and marketers in-terested in marketing snowmobiling as recreational activities.

Strategic voting in valuation choice experiments violates the common modeling assumption that everyone votes for his unconditionally most preferred choice. This presents a challenge to accurate estimation of values. We provide an examination of strategic voting in a homegrown value experiment that mimics choice experiments. In this way, we can test whether “prompting” participants to think about the others’ vote affects their vote. We reject this hypothesis. We also solicit participant perceptions about the vote distribution and test whether these perceptions affect their vote. We find that they do, but that the percentage of strategic voters is small.

Choice-based conjoint experiments are used when choice alternatives can be described in terms of attributes. The objective is to infer the value that respondents attach to attribute levels. This method involves the design of profiles on the basis of attributes specified at certain levels. Respondents are presented sets of profiles and asked to select the one they consider best. Choice sets with no dominating or dominated profiles are called Pareto optimal, and these Pareto optimal choice sets are provided to respondents. However, if choice sets have too many profiles, they may be difficult to implement. Therefore, we provide strategies for reducing the number of profiles in choice sets. We consider situations where only a subset of interactions is of interest, and obtain connected main effects plans with smaller choice sets for 2^n and 3^n designs that are capable of estimating subsets of interactions inclusive of one specific factor. We also provide plans for estimating all main effects and one two-way interaction for mixed level designs. Next, we examine the relationship between certain Pareto Optimal choice sets and g-designs. Finally, we obtain connected main effects plans with smaller choice sets for estimating different subsets of interactions, not inclusive of one specific factor. / Statistics

Two experimental procedures are employed to value both health and environmental benefits from reducing pesticides in Uganda. The first experiment, an incentive compatible auction involves subjects with incomplete information placing bids to avoid consuming potentially contaminated groundnuts/water in a framed field experimental procedure. Three experimental treatments (information, proxy good, and group treatments) are used. Subjects are endowed with a monetary amount (starting capital) equivalent to half the country's per capita daily income (in small denominations). Two hundred and fifty seven respondents were involved in a total of 35 experimental sessions in Kampala and Iganga districts. Tobit model results indicate that subjects place significant positive values to avoid ill health outcomes, although these values vary by region, by treatment and by socio-economic characteristics. Gender differences were important in explaining bidding behavior, with male respondents in both study areas bidding higher to avoid ill health outcomes than females. Consistent with a priori expectation, rural population's average willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid ill health outcomes was lower (by 11.4 percent) than the urban population's WTP possibly reflecting the poverty level in the rural areas and how it translates into reduced regard for health and environmental improvements. Tests of hypotheses suggest (i) providing brief information to subjects just prior to the valuation exercise does not influence bid behavior, (ii) subjects are indifferent to the source of contamination: WTP to avoid health outcomes from potentially contaminated water and groundnuts are not significantly different, and (iii) the classical tendency to free-ride in public goods provision was observed, and this phenomenon was more pronounced in the urban than the rural area. The second experimental procedure involved 132 urban respondents making repeated choices from a set of scenarios described by attributes of water quality, an environmental good. Water quality is represented by profiles of water safety levels at varying costs. Analysis using the conditional (fixed effects) logit showed that urban subjects highly discount unsafe drinking water, and were willing to pay less for safe agricultural water, a result not unexpected considering that the urban population is not directly involved in agricultural activities and thus does not value agricultural water quality as much as drinking water quality. Results also showed that subjects' utility increased with the cost of a water sample (inconsistent with a downward sloping demand curve), suggesting perhaps that they perceived higher costs to be associated with higher water quality. Some theoretically inconsistent results were obtained with choice experiments. / Ph. D.

Over the last century the Chesapeake Bay has been plagued by pollution, disease and overharvesting of its resources. As a result, the Bay has been the focus of substantial research and the beneficiary of numerous environmental programs. Previous work has suggested that people are willing to pay for improved water quality in the Chesapeake Bay. For policymakers, the key challenge is to determine how to allocate scarce funds across alternative regulatory and subsidy programs. This thesis investigates three new research questions that relate to the policymaker's problem. First, does WTP for a given water quality improvement depend on the process used to obtain that improvement? Second, does introducing a publicly funded program to improve water quality crowd out private donations to charitable organizations? Third, could oysters in the Chesapeake Bay be successfully marketed as a "green" good? The results from an attribute based choice experiment survey indicate that individuals value process and that they have a higher value for water quality improvement processes that include positive externalities such as increasing oyster populations and planting acres of tall grasses. The results also imply that the new water quality program will crowd out a small portion of private donations to charitable organizations. For example, a $1 tax increase for a new water quality program would crowd out approximately $0.02 of private donations to Chesapeake Bay organizations. Finally, results from a contingent valuation exercise suggest that oyster consumers are willing to pay a significant premium for ecolabeled oysters. Specifically, consumers are willing to pay a 58% premium for half-shell oysters. / Master of Science

<p> The sales of deer licenses, one of the most important revenue sources for wildlife management at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (IDNR), have been declining for a decade. To increase its funds, the agency is considering launching a new lifetime deer license, which would allow hunters to harvest deer (and possibly other species) each year for the rest of their lives in exchange for a large, up-front fee. The forward-looking nature of the decision to buy a lifetime license means hunters’ choice behavior is necessarily dynamic. We estimate a dynamic discrete choice model using data from a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to capture this forward-looking choice behavior and to estimate hunters’ preferences for different lifetime license designs. We find that our dynamic model better fits our data than a standard, static choice model. We also find that hunters prefer licenses that allow (i) harvest of antlered and antlerless deer to one that only allows harvest of antlerless deer and (ii) harvest of additional species beyond just deer. We use our model to estimate the price of lifetime licenses that maximizes IDNR revenues. This is the first study to estimate the value of lifetime deer hunting licenses using a dynamic approach. This dynamic approach can help improve the IDNR’s decision-making to maximize its revenue and stabilize wildlife management funds.  </p>

<p>In recent years, government aid agencies and international organizations have increased their financial commitments to controlling and eliminating malaria from the planet. This renewed emphasis on elimination is reminiscent of a previous worldwide campaign to eradicate malaria in the 1960s, a campaign which ultimately failed. To avoid a repeat of the past, mechanisms must be developed to sustain effective malaria control programs.</p><p>A number of sociobehavioral, economic, and biophysical challenges exist for sustainable malaria control, particularly in high-burden areas such as sub-Saharan Africa. Sociobehavioral challenges include maintaining high long-term levels of support for and participation in malaria control programs, at all levels of society. Reasons for the failure of the previous eradication campaign included a decline in donor, governmental, community, and household-level support for control programs, as malaria prevalence ebbed due in part to early successes of these programs.</p><p>Biophysical challenges for the sustainability of national malaria control programs (NMCPs) encompass evolutionary challenges in controlling the protozoan parasite and the mosquito vector, as well as volatile transmission dynamics which can lead to epidemics. Evolutionary challenges are particularly daunting due to the rapid generational turnover of both the parasites and the vectors: The reliance on a handful of insecticides and antimalarial drugs in NMCPs has placed significant selection pressures on vectors and parasites respectively, leading to a high prevalence of genetic mutations conferring resistance to these biocides.</p><p>The renewed global financing of malaria control makes research into how to effectively surmount these challenges arguably more salient now than ever. Economics has proven useful for addressing the sociobehavioral and biophysical challenges for malaria control. A necessary next step is the careful, detailed, and timely integration of economics with the natural sciences to maximize and sustain the impact of this financing.</p><p>In this dissertation, I focus on 4 of the challenges identified above: In the first chapter, I use optimal control and dynamic programming techniques to focus on the problem of insecticide resistance in malaria control, and to understand how different models of mosquito evolution can affect our policy prescriptions for dealing with the problem of insecticide resistance. I identify specific details of the biological model--the mechanisms for so-called "fitness costs" in insecticide-resistant mosquitoes--that affect the qualitative properties of the optimal control path. These qualitative differences carry over to large impacts on the economic costs of a given control plan.</p><p>In the 2nd chapter, I consider the interaction of parasite resistance to drugs and mosquito resistance to insecticides, and analyze cost-effective malaria control portfolios that balance these 2 dynamics. I construct a mathematical model of malaria transmission and evolutionary dynamics, and calibrate the model to baseline data from a rural Tanzanian district. Four interventions are jointly considered in the model: Insecticide-spraying, insecticide-treated net distribution, and the distribution of 2 antimalarial drugs--sulfadoxine pyramethamine (SP) and artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). Strategies which coordinate vector controls and treatment protocols should provide significant gains, in part due to the issues of insecticide and drug resistance. In particular, conventional vector control and ACT use should be highly complementary, economically and in terms of disease reductions. The ongoing debate concerning the cost-effectiveness of ACTs should thus consider prevailing (and future) levels of conventional vector control methods, such as ITN and IRS: If the cost-effectiveness of widespread ACT distribution is called into question in a given locale, scaling up IRS and/or ITNs probably tilts the scale in favor of distributing ACTs. </p><p>In the 3rd chapter, I analyze results from a survey of northern Ugandan households I oversaw in November 2009. The aim of this survey was to assess respondents' perceptions about malaria risks, and mass indoor residual spraying (IRS) of insecticides that had been done there by government-sponsored health workers. Using stated preference methods--specifically, a discrete choice experiment (DCE)--I evaluate: (a) the elasticity of household participation levels in IRS programs with respect to malaria risk, and (b) households' perceived value of programs aimed at reducing malaria risk, such as IRS. Econometric results imply that the average respondent in the survey would be willing to forego a $10 increase in her assets for a permanent 1% reduction in malaria risk. Participation in previous IRS significantly increased the stated willingness to participate in future IRS programs. However, I also find that at least 20% of households in the region perceive significant transactions costs from IRS. One implication of this finding is that compensation for these transactions costs may be necessary to correct theorized public good aspects of malaria prevention via vector control.</p><p>In the 4th chapter, I further study these public goods aspects. To do so, I estimate a welfare-maximizing system of cash incentives. Using the econometric models estimated in the 3rd chapter, in conjunction with a modified version of the malaria transmission models developed and utilized in the first 2 chapters, I calculate village-specific incentives aimed at correcting under-provision of a public good--namely, malaria prevention. This under-provision arises from incentives for individual malaria prevention behavior--in this case the decision whether or not to participate in a given IRS round. The magnitude of this inefficiency is determined by the epidemiological model, which dictates the extent to which households' prevention decisions have spillover effects on neighbors. </p><p>I therefore compute the efficient incentives in a number of epidemiological contexts. I find that non-negligible monetary incentives for participating in IRS programs are warranted in situations where policymakers are confident that IRS can effectively reduce the incidence of malaria cases, and not just exposure rates. In these cases, I conclude that the use of economic incentives could reduce the incidence of malaria episodes by 5%--10%. Depending on the costs of implementing a system of incentives for IRS participation, such a system could provide an additional tool in the arsenal of malaria controls.</p> / Dissertation

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Discrete choice experiments are used when choice alternatives can be described in terms of attributes. The objective is to infer the value that respondents attach to attribute levels. Respondents are presented sets of profiles based on attributes specified at certain levels and asked to select the profile they consider best. When the number of attributes or attribute levels becomes large, the profiles in a single choice set may be too numerous for respondents to make precise decisions. One strategy for reducing the size of choice sets is the sub-setting of attributes. However, the optimality of these reduced size choice sets has not been examined in the literature. We examine the optimality of reduced size choice sets for 2^n experiments using information per profile (IPP) as the optimality criteria. We propose a new approach for calculating the IPP of designs obtained by dividing attributes into two or more subsets with one, two, and in general, r overlapping attributes, and compare the IPP of the reduced size designs with the original full designs. Next we examine the IPP of choice designs based on 3^n factorial experiments. We calculate the IPP of reduced size designs obtained by sub-setting attributes in 3^n plans and compare them to the original full designs. / Statistics