Choosing not to choose: A meta-analysis of status quo effects in environmental valuations using choice experiments

Preference of Older Adults for Flexibility in Service and Providers in Community-Based Social Care: A Discrete Choice Experiment

Empowerment of control and choice of the service users in health and social care has been incorporated into service provision in various countries. This study aimed to elicit the preference of community-based long-term care (LTC) service users on levels of flexibility in service provision. A discrete choice experiment was performed among older community care service users to measure their preference for attributes of LTC services identified from a prior qualitative study. Each participant was asked to make choices in six choice tasks with two alternatives of hypothetical LTC services that were generated from the attributes. A generalized multinomial logistic model was applied to determine the relative importance and willingness to pay for the attributes. It found that the participants preferred multiple flexible providers, determining services by themselves, meeting case managers every month and social workers as sources of information on service provision. Significant preference heterogeneity was found for flexibility in providers and flexibility in services between those with and without activity of daily living impairment. The findings highlighted the preference of older adults for greater flexibility in LTC, while they rely heavily on social workers in decision making. The enhancement of flexibility in LTC should be supported by policies that allow the older service users to make decisions based on their own preferences or communication with social workers instead of determining the services and providers for them. Options should be offered to users to decide their preferred level of flexibility to better reflect their divided preferences.

A comprehensive approach for agroecosystem services and disservices valuation

The use of the ecosystem services approach for ecosystem management, including the valuation of ecosystem services, has grown in recent decades. Although a common framework is used, each ecosystem has its own characteristics. The agroecosystem, for example, is an anthropised ecosystem where ecosystem service flows are highly interrelated with the environment, positively or negatively. Therefore, agroecosystem services are usually accompanied by disservices. The valuation of agroecosystem services and disservices requires adaptation of existing ecosystem services paradigms to accommodate the innate agroecosystem idiosyncrasies. To this end, in this study, a comprehensive approach for valuation of agroecosystem services and disservices was proposed and validated in a semi-arid western Mediterranean agricultural area through stakeholder assessment, using a choice experiment. The results suggest that all categories of services (provisioning, regulating, and cultural) should be taken into account when valuing agroecosystem services and disservices. In particular, food provision (a provisioning service), water (a provisioning disservice), local climate regulation and biodiversity (regulating services), waste treatment and water purification (regulating disservices), and recreation and tourism (cultural services) are relevant for this purpose. Their relative importance in agroecosystems valuation reached 70% for agroecosystem services and 30% for disservices. Specifically, biodiversity (38%) emerged as the most relevant agroecosystem service to be valued, followed by recreation and tourism (20%), local climate regulation (7%), and food provision (5%). Among the agroecosystem disservices, water and waste treatment (15%), and water purification (15%) together contributed to 30% of the total importance. Agroecosystems should be valued considering their multifunctional character and the integration of agroecosystem services and disservices.

Valuation of ecosystem services using choice experiment with preference heterogeneity: A benefit transfer analysis across inland river basin

River ecosystem services offer a variety of benefits to the inhabitants of inland areas. For the valuation of environmental goods and services in the context of attaining a better environmental status across Heihe River basin (HRB), Northwest of China by 2020, a survey was conducted employing choice experiment approach across the entire river basin. The selected ecological attributes were defined in combination with ecological improvements in the three sub-basins namely upper, middle and lower sub-basins. For estimating spatial preference heterogeneity, the benefits for the inhabitants were estimated by conditional logit and mixed logit models. Results indicated that the willingness to pay (WTP) estimates for river water quality, farmland irrigation, sandstorm days, lake area, biodiversity, landscape and leisure & entertainment were significantly different across sub-basins. The WTP for water quality in upper basin was RMB 126.6 per year, while in middle and lower sub-basin was RMB 97.1 and 66.4 per year respectively. The estimates of mixed logit model indicated the reduced transfer errors with the insertion of taste heterogeneity. However, transferring benefits from middle sub-basin to upper sub-basin the estimated transfer errors were 27.3%, from lower to middle the transfer errors were 23.4% and from upper to lower the transfer errors were 14.1%. Our obtained results recommend the transferability of non-market benefits among sub-basins.