Estimating Willingness to Pay and Resource Tradeoffs with Different Payment Mechanisms: An Evaluation of a Funding Guarantee for Watershed Management

This study reports on a contingent choice survey in which respondents expressed their preferences for packages of watershed management outcomes, where these packages were assessed against alternative institutional characteristics of the funding mechanism. Specifically, this study addresses the issue of respondentsʹ faith in the payment mechanism as an efficient and guaranteed funding source. Analyses of marginal willingness to pay for single variable changes, marginal rates of substitution among variable pairs, and willingness to pay for watershed management packages indicate the potential for significant impacts of payment mechanism attributes. Implications address ranking of policy packages and validity in estimating money-scaled welfare impacts