The effect of experience on choosing where to go: an application to a choice experiment on forest recreation

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of experience on the choice of visits to forests in a stated discrete choice experiment. Recent literature has indicated that experiences with the environmental services valuated may increase the respondents' certainty in their choice of hypothetical alternatives. We apply two indicators of experiences: the number of visits and the number of different forests visited during the last year. Applying the generalized multinomial logit model, we find that an increase in the number of visits to forests makes respondents' choices more predictable. However, the number of different forests visited reduces the predictability of choices. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between respondents' experience of forest recreation and the self-reported choice certainty, controlling for respondents' social-demographics and other design characteristics. Finally, we show that self-reported choice certainty is positive correlated with the scale factor, as expected.

Keywords:

• forest recreation
• choice modeling
• scale
• uncertainty
• experiences

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the discussants from the 21st Annual Conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Goods have been divided into ‘search goods’ and ‘experience goods’ where search goods are goods where quality is easy to assess before purchase. For experience goods, it is difficult to assess the quality before purchase and use of the good or service (Nelson 1970).

2. For details of log-likelihood's simulation, see Revelt and Train (1998) and Fiebig et al. (2010).

3. An overview of French studies on the recreational value of forests can be found in Montagne et al. (2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was co-financed by a grant from the Lorraine region, France; the European Forest Institute; the French National Research Agency (ANR) through the ARBRE Laboratory of Excellence, a part of the Investments for the Future Program (ANR11-LABX-0002-01); the French Ministry of Agriculture in the framework of the Pôle de Compétences FABELOR.