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on Tourism Economics |
| By: | Jeon, Yongsik; Herriges, Joseph A.; Kling, Catherine L.; Downing, John |
| Abstract: | Recreation demand models typically incorporate measures of the physical attributes of recreational sites; e.g., Secchi depth or phosphorous levels in case of water quality. Moreover, most studies show that individuals do respond to these physical characteristics in choosing where to recreate. However, the question remains as to whether the available physical measures accurately capture individual perceptions of water quality and if there is a additional role to be played by elicited perception measures in modeling recreation demand. In this paper, we use data from the 2004 Iowa Lakes Survey to model recreation demand as a function of both the physical water quality at 131 lakes in the state and household perceptions of lake water quality. In general, water quality perceptions are correlated with the available physical measures, but not perfectly so, and both actual and perceived water quality are found to significantly impact recreational site choice. |
| JEL: | Q5 |
| Date: | 2005–11–14 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:isu:genres:12474&r=tur |
| By: | Jeon, Yongsik; Herriges, Joseph A. |
| Abstract: | Recreation demand modeling efforts are often limited by the range of variation in observed environmental quality. To address this limitation, the practitioners increasingly makes use of contingent behavior (CB) data; i.e., asking survey respondents to forecast their trip patterns under hypothetical quality conditions. However, relatively little is know as to whether these stated responses are consistent with how households response to actual quality variation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the convergent validity of CB data with observed trip patterns. Toward this end, we jointly model the recreation lake usage for in Iowa using observed and CB trip data collected from the 2004 Iowa Lakes Survey. The Iowa lakes survey collected three sets of trip data for 131 lakes in the state: (a) actual trips in 2004, (b) anticipated trips in 2005 to the same lakes given current lake conditions and (c) anticipated trips in 2005 given hypothetical improvements to a subset of the lakes. The three types of recreation demand data provide a unique opportunity to investigate the convergent validity of individual responses to actual versus hypothetical environmental conditions. |
| JEL: | Q5 |
| Date: | 2005–11–14 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:isu:genres:12473&r=tur |