Understanding heterogeneous preferences for angling site attributes: application of a choice experiment

ABSTRACT

This article studies anglers’ willingness to pay for improvements in the characteristics of fishing sites in the county of Jämtland in Sweden. We use two existing angling sites, and hypothetical sites similar to these, to explore transferability of responses between different sites and to examine the welfare effects of improvements in fishing site characteristics. We find that anglers have highly heterogenous preferences, and that modelling this heterogeneity using latent class models leads to different classes being estimated for the two different sites studied. This heterogeneity implies that policy interventions need to consider the specific characteristics of the angling groups being targeted by the intervention, but the heterogeneity also affects the precision with which estimates from one angling site can be applied to another site.

KEYWORDS:

• Angling valuation
• northern Sweden
• grayling
• trout
• choice experiment
• heterogenous preferences
• welfare effects

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Runar Brännlund and Nick Hanley as well as to participants at the 2014 Ulvön conference in environmental economics, at the 2015 Luleå PhD workshop in economics, the 2015 EAERE conference in Helsinki and at the 2017 IAERE conference in Rome for valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the paper. We are indebted to the anglers who gave so generously of their time in order to participate in the survey. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We also estimated RPL models, with qualitatively similar results to the LCM results reported here. Results for the RPL models are available from the authors upon request.

2. Total cost is defined as the sum of the cost of accommodation and the travel expenses.

Additional information

Funding

Elforsk; The Adaptiv förvaltning research programme; The R&D programme Kraft och liv i vatten supported by several hydropower companies in Sweden, the Swedish Energy Agency, the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management and Sweden's water authorities.