Sad or happy? The effects of emotions on stated preferences for environmental goods
Abstract
A substantial literature in behavioural science and psychology shows that emotions affect human choices and values. This paper investigates whether such emotional impacts are also present in stated choice experiments for environmental goods. If this were so, it would introduce an additional element of context dependence to the welfare measures derived from such methods, and would be at odds with the rational choice model underlying welfare economics. A laboratory experiment using three different emotion treatments was combined with a stated preference choice experiment concerned with changes in coastal water quality and fish populations in New Zealand. No statistically significant effects of changes in emotional state on estimated preference parameters, willingness to pay or the randomness of choices were found. The paper concludes by questioning, why such a contrast exists with empirical findings in behavioural science.
Citation
Hanley , N , Boyce , C , Czajkowski , M , Tucker , S , Noussair , C & Townsend , M 2017 , ' Sad or happy? The effects of emotions on stated preferences for environmental goods ' , Environmental and Resource Economics , vol. 68 , no. 4 , pp. 821-846 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-016-0048-9
Publication
Environmental and Resource Economics
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0924-6460Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Authors 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
The authors thank MASTS (the Marine Alliance for Science and Technology Scotland) for funding the experimental work, the University of Waikato Distinguished Visitors fund for funding Hanley’s research visit during which the empirical work was undertaken, and Leo Xiong for programming the experiment. MC gratefully acknowledges the support of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the Foundation for Polish Science.Collections
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