Comparison of contingent valuation and conjoint analysis in ecosystem management

Contingent valuation (CV) and conjoint analysis were used to estimate landowner’s willingness to pay (WTP) for ecosystem management on non-industrial private forest land. The results suggest that even when conjoint and CV questions are the same, except for rating and pricing format, respectively, WTP estimates are quite different. Since most conjoint models essentially count ‘maybe’ responses to valuation questions as ‘yes’ responses, we conclude that conjoint model results often produce WTP estimates that are biased upwards. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.