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Abstract
Investigating incentives, through valuation context and questions, that motivate
respondents to reveal their true values for environmental good under consideration has
been a long-standing area of research in stated preference literature. A large number of
previous non-market valuation studies have focused on various dimensions of valuation
questions and context and have investigated how these dimensions affect the incentives to
answer truthfully. An important, but relatively less-explored, area is the inclusion of a
provision rule, by which environmental good under investigation will be provided, and how
this affects participants’ incentives to tell the true values. Provision rules, that are made
explicit to survey respondents, provide a connection between survey choices and actual
outcomes. Advancements in Mechanism Design Theory have recently attracted researchers’
attention on examining alternative provision rules using discrete choice experiments (DCE)
and comparing preferences and tradeoffs across provision rules. Only very few studies,mostly in laboratory experiments, have attempted to examine the influence of the inclusion
of a provision rule in elicited preferences and tradeoffs. Employing a split-sample approach,
this study compares a single decision-maker’s choice and a plurality vote provision rules in
in-person choice experiments using real cash for actual implementation of ecosystem
restoration project on the ground. A very preliminary conditional logit model results
suggest that both rules produce statistically similar preference functions in terms of
marginal values and tradeoffs between restoration attributes. Further analysis is yet to be
conducted to ensure these preliminary results hold consistently using a Latent Class Model
to incorporate preference heterogeneity for ecosystem restoration.