Valuing Access to our Public Lands: A Unique Public Good Pricing Experiment



1. Introduction

This paper reports the findings of a unique nation-wide experiment to price access to our public lands.
The Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act of 2004 mandated a new recreation pass (hereafter, the
NRP) to replace the Golden Eagle Passport (GEP) and the National Parks Pass (NPP). The new pass,
similar to the GEP, covers all federal lands that charge an entrance or access fee for recreational use. Our
economic and survey research team undertook an economic analysis of the new pass program and
submitted a price recommendation to federal land management agencies in the fall of 2006. The project
was completed under the constraint that the NRP should “provide convenient access, at a fair price, to
federal recreation sites that charge fees.. ..and should at least allow the government to break even in the
sense that,
on average, the sale of the [NRP] does not result in a revenue loss relative to the revenue that
would be received absent the ability to purchase an annual pass.”1 After receiving our analysis and price
recommendation, in December 2006 the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and the Interior announced that
the price for the annual NRP would be set at $80; the new pass went on sale in January 2007.

Herein we describe the methodological and economic issues associated with assisting federal land
management agencies to determine an appropriate price for the new pass. We use contingent valuation
(CV) methods to help determine an appropriate price for the NRP. CV and other stated preference
valuation methods have made significant in-roads into public decision making over the last two decades.
Federal decision makers use the value estimates to help guide their decision making for a range of topics
like water quality protection, air quality improvements, watershed and ecosystem protection, and reduced
human health risk (see for example Brown, Champ, and Boyle, 2004).

In the present application, an innovative experimental design allows us to contrast the hypothetical
purchasing decisions of survey respondents with the actual purchasing decisions of households. As a
result, we are less open to a major criticism of contingent valuation analysis—hypothetical bias.

1 There are other possible policy objectives to consider (e.g., public education, congestion, pollution, and
deterioration of infrastructure, etc.) that were outside the scope of our current study. Our goal was to provide
information to help set the price of the new pass given the objective of maintaining revenue neutrality, rather than
exploring the
optimal price of the pass based on the full social costs.



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