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

To explore these possibilities, we allow 40% of the WTP for the NRP to be derived from
convenience, stewardship concerns, trip over-estimation, and/or other “non-economic” factors. Note this
percentage is strictly illustrative—we are unable to estimate directly the non-economic component of
WTP. In this case, rather than being a revenue loser, the NRP program could actually become a revenue
generator for NRP prices greater than $60 - but only if nearly 40% of the value of the NRP is due to
stewardship or other non-economic factors.¹⁴ This seems unlikely given our survey shows limited
evidence of stewardship purchasers and little systematic over-estimation of visitation to federal recreation
sites.

7. Concluding remarks

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). Herein we
describe our use of contingent valuation to assist U.S. federal land management agencies to determine an
appropriate price for a new recreation pass providing access to all federal lands. The project was spurred
by the U.S. Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act of 2004, which authorized a new recreation pass
(NRP) to replace the existing Golden Eagle Passport and the National Parks Pass. The open question we
addressed was evaluating how much to charge for the new recreation pass given the preferences of the
general public and the revenue neutral constraints of the federal agencies. We designed and administered
a contingent valuation survey to over 3700 households to estimate households’ willingness to pay for the
new pass at a variety of different prices.

Our experimental design allows us to estimate the degree of hypothetical bias in the sample and
calibrate our WTP estimates to reflect actual purchasing decisions. We find the general U.S. population -
most of whom have little experience with similar federal passes - tend to greatly exaggerate their WTP

¹⁴ The estimation results are omitted to conserve space but are available from the authors upon request.

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