Recreation Demand and the Influence of Site Preference Variables

Abstract

Leisure researchers' conceptions of how individuals make decisions involve an understanding of the personal tastes, motives, and private decisions that directly affect an individual's utility (satisfaction) of substitute site choices. Following recent theoretical advances in recreation demand, the participant is first viewed as deciding on the number of site trips to take per season and next, as deciding on how to allocate the trips across substitute sites. Decisions are analyzed by linking the results from a nested logit model to separate count-data models using consumer demand theory and trip-price indexes. Our purposes are two-fold. The first is to determine if the inclusion of the respondents' perceived importance of lake attributes in a nested logit model of lake boating improves the allocation of trips to the various lakes in a geographic region. The second is to demonstrate an empirical application of discrete-count modeling and to compare annual trip-counts of lake boating from a discrete-count model with a traditional pooled lakes model.

KEYWORDS:

• Recreation choice behavior
• outdoor recreation demand
• recreation modeling
• lakes
• discrete choice