Fishing for angler preferences: Nonmarket valuation of saltwater recreational fishing

The focus of this research is provide insight into some of the aspects of modeling preferences and estimating willingness-to-pay for nonmarket resources that have been given insufficient attention in the existing literature. The existing literature related to the creation of an experimental design is insufficient to answer basic questions about the strengths of designs built for choice models relative to designs built for linear models within the most common context in which a researcher is conducting a choice experiment and has no prior knowledge of the data generating process. Adequate modeling of the opt-out option in the discrete choice models used to estimate willingness-to-pay is another subject that is lacking in the literature. Choice models used to estimate willingness-to-pay in the context of recreational use values are typically composed of three options, including the opt-out option. In the vast majority of cases, nothing is known about the attributes and levels for this option and researchers are forced to assign zero levels to all attributes other than an alternative-specific constant for this option. This becomes problematic when the opt-out option represents different types of trips, locations, or activities across choice sets for a given respondent. A simple alternative to the approach is allowed by including a simple follow-up question in the standard choice experiment format. The context of this research is saltwater recreational fishing in the Northwest, which provides fishery managers in the Northwest with recreational use values that can be used to inform a wide range of policy decisions. In particular, we survey recreational fishing license holders in Washington and Oregon in order to elicit up-to-date preferences related to saltwater fishing trip attributes. These data and associated choice models provide recreational use values for the most commonly targeted saltwater species: Chinook and Coho salmon, Pacific halibut, lingcod, and rockfish. While saltwater fishing in the Northwest has been the subject of a wide array of research over the past few decades, all of the existing literature is out of date and limited in scope to some extent. For example, while there are noted biological differences between hatchery and wild stocks of salmon, all economic valuation to date has implicitly treated the two as perfect substitutes. This research is intended to fill many of these gaps.