Social influences on expressed willingness to pay: results of a deliberative monetary valuation study in Colombia

Abstract

Deliberative monetary valuation (DMV) methods can support environmental decision making by enabling the exchange of arguments and information to produce more democratic outcomes. The product of a valuation may be an array of expressions of willingness to pay (WTP) by individuals or a collectively agreed monetary value. Concerns have been raised, however, as to whether this product is an outcome of thoughtful and independent decision-making or influenced by social pressures to conform. Our study examines this issue and addresses concerns about the use of DMV, based on a public deliberation of forest conservation in Colombia. We analyzed the impacts of social conformity on WTP under two different decision scenarios: individual and collective. The results suggest that the impacts of social conformity are greater when a collective decision is required. These findings indicate that tensions between the differing goals of DMV could undermine its democratic promise.

Keywords:

• deliberative monetary valuation
• deliberative democracy
• social conformity
• willingness to pay
• Tropical Dry Forest

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants of the deliberative workshop, who crucially contributed to the success of the research project. All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Human Research Ethics Committee of Griffith University, Australia, and the Ethics Committee of Universidad del Norte, Colombia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2016.1232646.

Notes

1. Deliberation is in itself a contested concept; nevertheless, it can be defined as “communication that induces reflection on preferences, values and interests in a non-coercive fashion” (Mansbridge et al. 2010, 65).

2. For deliberative democracy theories grounded on Habermas’ Theory of communicative action (Habermas 1984) legitimate decisions require consensus. A more detailed discussion on the relationship between the theories of deliberative democracy and DMV is developed in Lo and Spash (2013) and Vargas et al. (Forthcoming).

3. We do not formulate the problem in term of the motives stated by participants to support their WTP expressions since there could be different reasons justifying the same WTP decision. See for instance Lo (2013). We thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to this issue.

4. ($1, $2, $3, $5, $7, $10, $15, $20, $30, $40, $50) values in thousand Colombian pesos.

5. Participants in the workshop received COP25,000 for their participation.

6. 2013 market Exchange rate: COP1,869 per USD. Source: Banco de la República, Colombia.

7. Estimations were performed using cluster standard errors for inference. Bell and McCaffrey (2002) modification for small samples was employed. For statistical analysis we used the software STATA 11 and the code provided by Brigham Frandsen, which can be downloaded at https://economics.byu.edu/frandsen/Pages/software.aspx.

8. For the Hcloser regression we also used more disaggregated income and education categories and the results remain qualitatively the same.

9. The test using the robust test statistic proposed by (Brown and Forsythe 1974) yields the same result (p-value = 0.79).

Additional information

Funding

This work would not be possible without the financial and personnel support of the Strategic Area Program on Biodiversity, Ecosystem Services and Well-Being of Universidad del Norte, Colombia (2013-DI0025). Additional funding was provided by the School of Environment at Griffith University, Australia (ENV1010AMHAV). Funding sources had no role in any of the stages of this study.