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Stated preferences: a unique database composed of 1657 recent published articles in journals related to agriculture, environment, or health

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Abstract

Numerous articles dealing with stated preferences are published every year in journals related to agriculture, environment, or health. Hence, it is not easy to find all the relevant articles when performing a benefit transfer, a meta-analysis, or a review of literature. Also, it is not easy to identify trends or common practices in these fields regarding the elicitation method. We have constructed and made available a unique database comprising 1657 choice experiment and/or contingent valuation articles published in journals related to agriculture, environment, or health between 2004 and 2016. We show that the number of choice experiment studies keeps increasing and the single-bounded dichotomous choice format is the most employed question format in contingent valuation studies. We also consider the new nomenclature proposed by Carson and Louviere and we show that the “discrete choice experiment” is more popular than the “matching method,” especially in journals related to agriculture.

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Notes

  1. It should of course be noted that these techniques are also very widely used outside a non-market valuation context, such as in many transport and marketing applications.

  2. CE belongs to the family of methods where respondents make a choice between different options, rather than indicating an explicit valuation (Hanley et al. 2001). Other examples include the contingent ranking, contingent rating and best-worst approaches.

  3. For a more comprehensive description of these techniques, see for instance Bateman et al. (2002).

  4. The first CE application in the field of environment was conducted in late 1980s according to Hess and Rose (2009).

  5. Carson and Louviere define the MM and DCE as follows (p. 545): “The first are matching methods (MM), where respondents effectively are asked to provide a number (or numbers) that will make them indifferent in some sense. The second are DCEs that effectively ask respondents to pick their most preferred alternative from a set of options.”

  6. Both data and STATA code can be downloaded at the following address: “https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B6-aWRdEl74JbzRpbFR1Z2VGY2M?usp=sharing”. They are also available in the journal website.

  7. See also the post written by Whitehead (2011) in a blog: http://www.env-econ.net/2011/06/contingent-valuation-vs-choice-experiments-1989-2011.html.

  8. Alternative surveys of the literature can also be found in Sach et al. (2007), Bateman et al. (2002), and Alberini and Kahn (2009).

  9. We also tried “matching method” in ISI search tool. Out of the 65 results, only one article dealt with SP.

  10. The list of “keywords plus” is generated by ISI to broaden the search. KeyWords Plus reviews the titles of all references and includes keywords that were not listed by the authors.

  11. An interesting example of comparison is the split sample survey conducted by McNair et al. (2011). Participants were faced with a single binary choice set (CV) or several ones (CE).

  12. Mixed articles were removed.

  13. An article written by four coauthors will contribute four observations to the new sample.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors for constructive comments. We are also grateful to an anonymous referee from FAERE on a previous version of the paper. Finally, we would like to thank Jordan Louviere, Gildas Appéré and Muriel Travers for helpful comments.

Funding

We acknowledge financial support by the European Research Council through the consolidator grant 615596-DECISIONS.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. LEMNA, University of Nantes, Chemin de la Censive du Tertre - BP 52231, 44322, Nantes Cedex 3, France

    Pierre-Alexandre Mahieu & François-Charles Wolff

  2. Toulouse School of Economics, University of Toulouse Capitole, Toulouse, France

    Henrik Andersson

  3. LISA, University of Corsica Pasquale Paoli, Corte, France

    Olivier Beaumais

  4. University of Rouen Normandy, Rouen, France

    Olivier Beaumais

  5. Institute for Transport Studies & Choice Modelling Centre, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Romain Crastes dit Sourd & Stephane Hess

  6. INED, Paris, France

    François-Charles Wolff

Authors
  1. Pierre-Alexandre Mahieu
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Correspondence to Pierre-Alexandre Mahieu.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 4 Ranking of the 15 journals publishing the most in the fields of agriculture, environment, and health
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Mahieu, PA., Andersson, H., Beaumais, O. et al. Stated preferences: a unique database composed of 1657 recent published articles in journals related to agriculture, environment, or health. Rev Agric Food Environ Stud 98, 201–220 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41130-017-0053-6

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