The impact of nature documentaries on public environmental preferences and willingness to pay: entropy balancing and the blue planet II effect

Abstract

In this study, the discrete choice experiment approach was employed in a survey of the Scottish general public to analyze how respondents make tradeoffs between blue growth potential and marine ecosystem service delivery associated with the Mingulay cold water reef complex. Results indicate a higher willingness to pay for management options associated with the highest possible levels of marine litter control followed by the highest possible levels of fish health. Using entropy balancing, a multivariate reweighting method to produce balanced samples in observational studies, we also test the impact that having watched the BBC Blue Planet II documentary series may have had on individuals’ willingness to support marine conservation activity. Whether or not respondents had seen the BBC Blue Planet II series was found to have a significant impact on people’s preferences. Despite this, the willingness to pay (WTP) does not differ between the two groups, suggesting that such documentaries may impact preferences but not the final action of WTP. It is argued that the entropy weighting approach can be a useful tool in discrete choice modeling when the researcher is concerned with estimating differences in preferences between a group of interest and a comparison group.

Keywords:

• entropy balancing
• willingness to pay
• discrete choice model
• marine ecosystem services
• nature documentaries

Acknowledgements

This output reflects only the author’s view and the European Union cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2020.1828840

Notes

1 The eight episodes of the series ran from the 29^th of October 2017 to the 1^st of January 2018. Following its release, the series was subsequently made available to download for UK-based residents on the BBC iPlayer catch up service for a period of 7 months. It was also made available to purchase as a DVD box set from the BBC and was available to watch on Netflix from December 2018 to December 2019.

2 It should be noted that, in this instance, the donations were not the respondents’ own money but were donated on their behalf by the researchers conducting the experiment.

3 We did not record the number of episodes watched, so cannot explore effects with respect to the level of exposure. This is a potential avenue for future research.

4 Although not applied here, the latent class model is another popular alternative for analyzing stated preference choice data (Grilli and Curtis 2020). For a more in-depth presentation of the RUM framework and the alternative choice models that can be applied the interested reader is directed to Train (2003) and Hensher, Rose, and Green (2010).

5 Separate CL models for the subsamples who watched BPII, who did not watch it (unweighted), who did not watch it with EB weights, and a model for the entire sample excluding BPII interaction terms is also provided for comparison in the appendix (table A2).

6 As in the CL case, no statistical differences were found in the coefficient estimates across the weighted versus unweighted versions of the RPL model, so to focus the analysis only the weighted results are shown here. The unweighted RPL model results are available from the authors upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 678760 (ATLAS).