Relationship between the actual environmental landscape surrounding residents and their willingness to pay for the landscape: Evidence from a discrete choice experiment

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between existing environmental and non-environmental landscapes and residents' preferences for landscapes in their neighborhoods. Investigating this relationship contributes to expanding the knowledge on the spatial heterogeneity in people's environmental preferences. Spatial heterogeneity in people’s environmental preferences is related to the economic evaluation of environmental policies and the efficient provision of environmental amenities. We conducted a discrete choice experiment on 579 residents in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. The survey data were combined with geographic information system (GIS) data on land use and analyzed as a spatial structured data of 1 km2 using a mixed logit model. The main empirical finding is that the willingness to pay for a marginal increase in the surrounding landscape generally increases with the abundance of the surrounding landscape. We also found that the increase in the willingness to pay depends on the type of environmental and non-environmental landscape. Moreover, there was no relationship between the existing landscape and the preference for abandoned environmental landscapes. This study highlights the spatial sorting phenomenon in residential choice, which is a source of spatial heterogeneity in environmental preferences. When conducting environmental evaluation, it is necessary to explicitly incorporate the spatial heterogeneity in environmental preferences into any analytical framework.

Keywords

• Urban landscape
• Spatial heterogeneous preferences
• Stated preferences
• Discrete choice experiment
• Willingness to pay
• Mixed logit model