How diverse are preferences for urban fisheries? Evidence from a choice experiment

ABSTRACT

We used a choice experiment to learn about preference heterogeneity in the demand for urban fishing areas. The experiment featured a pair of small city lakes with catfish and sunfish, as well as several non-catch attributes, in a dual-response design that allowed subjects to rank their preferences for the two lakes and a no-fishing alternative. Based on responses from anglers living in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, we found evidence of heterogeneity in the desirability of catfish and sunfish, including between male and female anglers. We did not find strong evidence that preferences for catfish and sunfish associate with race, although compared to white anglers, racial minority anglers significantly preferred fishing rather than the stay-home alternative in the experiment. We estimate that, on average, anglers are willing to pay approximately $2 to catch a catfish and $0.50 to catch a sunfish at small city lakes.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-market valuation
• stated preferences
• dual response
• discrete choice model

Notes

1. Between 1990 and 2010, the share of people living in urban areas increased from 75% to 81%, and this share is projected to increase to 90% by 2050 (Center for Sustainable Systems, 2019).

2. Throughout the text, we cite several important human dimensions studies that investigate preferences for urban fishing sites exclusively, however we are aware of only a handful of economic studies that quantify urban fishing preferences using actual or hypothetical choice data like we do here (e.g., Bingham et al., 2011; Lin et al., 1996; Mahasuweerachai et al., 2010; Melstrom & Welniak, 2019).

3. The maximum one-way driving distance from one end of Oklahoma City to the other is over 40 miles, but research on actual fishing behaviors indicates that anglers are less willing to drive far for small lakes than they are for large lakes. We therefore thought it unlikely that individuals would drive more than 25–30 miles for a Close to Home lake, and limited the range in the experiment to 27 miles.

4. As pointed out by a reviewer, our research design may suffer from anchoring bias if anglers are less likely to select the stay home alternative because the experiment offered this alternative separately. A design that could be used to test for anchoring bias would present one choice occasion with the forced choice, and another that included the stay home alternative.

5. We considered mixed logits with random parameters for the other attributes, including playground, restrooms and bank trees, as well as log-normal distributions for the catch attributes, but either the models did not converge or convergence was sensitive to the number of Halton sequences and the maximization technique. Our interpretation is that most unobserved taste heterogeneity in the data comes from the stay-home effect; this taste heterogeneity is apparent when one compares the drop in the log-likelihood value moving from Model 1 to Model 2, when there is no stay-home alternative, versus the drop moving from Model 3 to Model 4, which include the stay-home alternative.

6. We compute the willingness to pay per fish from the willingness to pay per choice occasion using an increase in the catch rate of ¼ fish per hour and assuming that a fishing day lasts four hours.