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Thursday, January 16th 2024

Chloé Beaudet (PSAE) will present “Spatially allocating preferences derived from a choice experiment: a comparison of two methods”.

Abstract:

Discrete choice experiments (DCE) are useful tools in environmental economics to guide policy making. However, DCE’s results are usually presented as average preferences among a population or a group, which can be of limited usefulness for spatial planning policies in which spatial heterogeneity is strong. In this paper, we propose two methods for spatializing the preferences derived from a DCE, that we call the “one-step” and the “two-step” methods. Both methods use the influence of socio-economic and spatial variables on the general preferences of the population to predict average willingness to pay (WTPs) for different attributes at small geographic scales. We aim to compare these methods to give guidelines and best practices to spatialize the results of DCEs. To do so, we employ Monte Carlo simulations, making different assumptions on the data generating process, to determine which method performs better in theory. Then, we apply the methods' comparison to the case of light pollution mitigation policies in Montpellier Metropolitan Area. Preliminary results lead us to prefer the one-step method over the two-step method, although the latter shows practical aspects that can be of interest to applied researchers.