THE CONTINGENT VALUATION OF FOREST CHARACTERISTICS: TWO EXPERIMENTS

Most work on valuing the recreational benefits of public forests has concentrated on estimating consumers' surplus per visit. We use two contingent valuation approaches to try to place a value on the physical characteristics of British forests, and hence to explain the variation in consumers' surplus across different forest types. Our two approaches are, first, to obtain incremental willingness‐to‐pay to access forests with different levels of a number of characteristics by showing visitors pairs of photographs; and second, to use characteristic levels as explanatory variables in a bid curve. We find that forest characteristics are in general poor predictors of willingness to pay.