Triggering Expressions of Public as Opposed to Private Preferences in the US and Denmark1

In an earlier valuation study two of the authors encountered questions from about 20% of the focus group members on the lines: "When I answer your questions should I wear my private (consumer) hat or my public (citizen) hat?". Even though the presence of "public" or altruistic preferences and of multiple preference orderings has achieved attention in the literature over several decades, little direct empirical work has been performed. The possible presence of such preferences (and of things that may trigger a specific preference ordering) may have important implications for policy design and implementation (in general) as well as for design and interpretation of contingent valuation studies. In the paper we present an ongoing project, which is designed to explore whether public (or citizen) preferences can be triggered in a predictable, controllable way by small framing changes in a valuation questionnaire. Sister projects are being conducted using the same methodology and similar settings in Nashville, Tennessee, in the US and in suburban Copenhagen, in Denmark. The settings are in both cases forested parks with a significant lake as a landscape (and potentially a recreation) feature. The test vehicle will be a MAU survey instrument asking respondents about their preferred level of intensity of recreation management (or use) of the forested park area. Three sub-samples (in the US and in Denmark) will receive questionnaires with different "frames" (i.e. different introductory text). The three different frames are respectively designed to trigger what can be labelled as (1) "private" preferences, (2) "public" preferences and (3) "committed" preferences (where the commitment is to the idea of ecological system preservation). We look for effects of the three frames in three dimensions: (a) the most preferred management intensity level; (b) whether the most preferred level is higher or lower intensity than the least preferred level; and (c) stated WTP for the preferred intensity level. The latter distinction is made because the mentioning of payment could in itself be an important trigger of private preferences.