Abstract
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a prion disease that affects deer, elk and other cervid wildlife species. Although there is no known link between the consumption of CWD affected meat and human health, hunters are advised to have animals from CWD affected areas tested and are advised against consuming meat from CWD infected animals (Government of Alberta 2010). We model hunter response to the knowledge that deer in a wildlife management unit have been found to have CWD in Alberta, Canada. We examine hunter site choice over two hunting seasons using revealed and stated preference data in models that incorporate preferences, choice set formation, and scale. We compare a fully endogenous choice set model using the independent availability logit model (Swait in Probabilistic choice set formation in transportation demand models. Dissertation, MIT, 1984) with the availability function approach (Cascetta and Papola in Transp Res C 9(4):249–263, 2001) that approximates choice set formation. We find that CWD incidence affects choice set formation and preferences and that ignoring choice set formation would result in biased estimates of impact and welfare measures. This study contributes to the broader recreation demand literature by incorporating choice set formation, scale and temporal impacts into a random utility model of recreation demand.
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Notes
CWD is a prion disease that affects elk, deer and moose and is essentially the cervid species form of “mad cow disease” or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). However, unlike BSE there is no known link between the consumption of CWD affected meat and human health. Nevertheless, hunters are advised to have animals from CWD affected areas tested and are advised against consuming meat from CWD infected animals (Government of Alberta 2010).
We note that von Haefen (2008) applied a Kuhn–Tucker demand system to model latent consideration sets. This model is attractive because it is tractable for large choice sets and can be estimated using standard econometric techniques. However the von Haefen approach employs a theoretical and empirical framework that is quite different from the RUM approach used in much of the literature. Therefore, we focus on the Haab and Hicks and IAL approach and do not employ the von Haefen model.
We note that the sample sizes employed are small, hence we make no claims about the ability of our study to predict the behavior of all Albertan deer hunters who may be affected by CWD. Rather we employ this data as a convenience sample to examine the usefulness of our empirical approaches.
The CWD threshold is set at 2.5 or greater for the RP data and greater than 2.5 for the SP data. Models with the CWD threshold both set at 2.5 or greater did not converge well—likely the result of limited variation and possibly a differential treatment of RP and SP data by respondents. We also removed the demographic variables (urban, etc.) from the availability function and focused on attribute thresholds as explanators of availability.
Abbreviations
- BSE:
-
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy
- CMNL:
-
Constrained multinomial logit model
- CPA:
-
Cascetta and Papola availability
- CWD:
-
Chronic wasting disease
- IAL:
-
Independent availability logit
- MNL:
-
Multinomial logit
- RP:
-
Revealed preference
- RUM:
-
Random utility model
- SP:
-
Stated preference
- WMU:
-
Wildlife management unit
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Funding support was provided by the Alberta Prion Research Institute.
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Truong, T., Adamowicz, W. & Boxall, P.C. Modelling the Effect of Chronic Wasting Disease on Recreational Hunting Site Choice Preferences and Choice Set Formation over Time. Environ Resource Econ 70, 271–295 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-017-0120-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-017-0120-0