Jorge E. Araña

University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria | ULPGC · Instituto Universitario de Turismo y Desarrollo Económico Sostenible (Tides)

Individual preferences for environmental policies can be influenced by the frame in which choices and decisions are presented. In this paper we present results of a field experiment on the contributions to carbon offsetting programs under two alternative treatments for the default option. The opt-in treatment asked subjects to pay for the policy pr...

Emotions can affect individuals' preferences and economic behavior. In this paper we consider the relationship between emotions and anchoring effects in non-market valuation. The findings show that although anchoring effects are relevant, elicited preferences are coherent, in the sense that they are sensitive to changes in the dimension of the good...

The evaluation of health care programmes is commonly approached with stated preference methods such as contingent valuation or discrete choice experiments. These methods provide useful information for policy decisions involving health regulations and infrastructures for health care. However, econometric modelling of these data usually relies on a n...

The unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of living with wildlife is one of the causes of human-carnivore conflicts. The existence of large carnivores is valued globally, but the costs of damages and management impacts human residents. The Apennine brown bear is endemic of central Italy and, besides its ecological value, it can attract tou...

The rise in urbanization has led to an expansion of traditional urban externalities toward suburban and rural areas together with changes in the preferences of human populations for noise and air pollution. This paper analyses the preferences of the population living in rural, suburban and urban areas for noise and air pollution utilizing a reveale...

Rural tourism has developed in recent decades with an increase in the activities available to tourists. In this article, the authors apply a cluster analysis for the segmentation of rural tourism in La Palma, Canary Islands. They consider the level of environmental attitudes of tourists as a variable explaining market segmentation. The results show...

Human-carnivore conflicts can be viewed also as a consequence of the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits that predators brings at the local, national or global scale. Large carnivores existence is valued globally, for cultural, aesthetic, or spiritual reasons but this value is difficult to estimates in monetary terms. The costs of damage...

Stargazing tourism is an expanding market niche that requires the development of territorial resources for its implementation and attraction. This paper’s objective is to investigate the preferences and willingness to pay of tourists for the development of strategic land resources for stargazing tourism activities. The field work was conducted on t...

Studies aiming at valuing cultural and natural heritage projects are often focussed on one or only a few sites, whereas planning decisions concerning the allocation of public funds to heritage conservation deal with classes of heritage rather than single sites. In addition, such planning decisions are almost always concerned with non-monetary value...

Land use changes in the Alps over the last few decades have been characterised by a significant increase in forest coverage as a result of the abandonment of marginal agricultural sites. Natural afforestation and species protection laws affected the ecosystem, and therefore the services provided by the mountain environment, including landscape stru...

Overpopulation and abandonment of pets are long-standing and burgeoning concerns that involve uncontrolled breeding and selling, illegal trafficking, overpopulation, and pet safety and well-being issues. Abandonment of pets creates numerous negative externalities and multimillion-dollar costs, in addition to severe consequences and problems concern...

This paper investigates the potential gap in Tour Operators (TOs) assessments of tourists' preferences for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in tourism. It utilizes discrete choice experiments to assess both tourists and TOs preferences. Results show that TOs understand tourists' average preferences for CSR policies but fail to predict the hete...

This paper presents results of an experiment in which tourists are informed both personally and non-personally about the water savings potential of their decisions about changing towels and bed linen. Tourists who were informed about the consequences of their actions reduced more the number of times that their towels or bed linens were changed. The...

This study presents evidence on the role of emotions in the monetary evaluation of health technologies, namely, drug-eluting stents (DES) in our case. It is shown that subjects who are very afraid of having to undergo an angioplasty are: (a) less sensitive to the size of the risk reduction provided by DES and (b) willing to pay more. The lack of sc...

El astroturismo es una propuesta de interés para un creciente volumen de turistas con motivaciones diversas. El acercamiento con propósito lúdico al conocimiento de la astronomía, el disfrute del paisaje nocturno, la observación de los elementos celestes bajo diversos diseños de actividad son componentes de un fértil campo de experiencias turística...

The choice of technologies used to remediate contaminated environments is increasingly made through engagement with a multitude of stakeholders including affected residents. Despite this, little is known about how residents perceive remediation technology applications. In this study a choice experiment is designed to explore ways of understanding a...

El turismo es una industria que ha demostrado un alto potencial para generar bienestar humano en muchos países y regiones del planeta. Sin embargo, este potencial está condicionado por el objetivo de la sostenibilidad, que implica la compatibilización de los equilibrios ambientales, sociales y económicos. Para conseguir el objetivo de la sostenibil...

Tourists' travel decisions can be influenced by appropriate policies that seek to encourage them to choose travel plans leading to more sustainable tourism practices. Based on using conventional cognitive decision-making models, most current policy recommendations employ market-based economic incentives (e.g. taxes). This paper employs a dual emoti...

Rural tourism has developed in recent decades with an increase in the activities available to tourists. In this paper the authors apply a cluster analysis for the segmentation of rural tourism in La Palma, Canary Islands. They consider the level of environmental attitudes of tourists as a variable explaining market segmentation. The results show th...

The management of national parks and natural areas often faces a balance between the residents' welfare, the tourist activity and the pressure on ecosystems. This paper assesses the benefits for a set of policies designed to address tourist congestion, the increase in the welfare of the local populations, and the improvements in the ecosystem servi...

This paper develops a novel methodology for estimating the value of destination image, which incorporates two principal advantages over the methods used to date. First, it allows tourism destination image to be assessed in economic terms, so a formal cost–benefit analysis can be executed to ascertain whether or not a specific marketing action shoul...

Climate change policies can compete with policies on other social and environmental problems for limited economic resources. This paper investigates the potential influence of alternative policies on citizens’ preferences for climate change policies. A contingent valuation study was implemented to estimate the impact of observable and unobservable...

Rapid technological change is leading to the introduction of new ways of providing services in the tourism industry. However, the human factor is also key in providing satisfaction to visitors. This article evaluates the preferences of visitors for different service designs at tourist information offices (TIOs). The methodology used is discrete cho...

This paper utilizes the subjective well being approach to benefit transfer of the welfare effects of reducing air pollution across a sample of citizens from several European countries. In addition, we compare the results of subjective well being utilizing the ordinal probit model approach with an alternative Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) approach...

Shani and Arad (2014) claimed that tourism scholars tend to endorse the most pessimistic assessments regarding climate change, and that anthropogenic climate change was a “fashionable” and “highly controversial scientific topic”. This brief rejoinder provides the balance that is missing from such climate change denial and skepticism studies on clim...

This final response to the two climate change denial papers by Shani and Arad further highlights the inaccuracies, misinformation and errors in their commentaries. The obfuscation of scientific research and the consensus on anthropogenic climate change may have significant long-term negative consequences for better understanding the implications of...

Shani and Arad (2014) claimed that tourism scholars tend to endorse the most pessimistic assessments regarding climate change, and that anthropogenic climate change was a “fashionable” and “highly controversial scientific topic”. This brief rejoinder provides the balance that is missing from such climate change denial and skepticism studies on clim...

This paper estimates the economic benefits of different alternative policies considered for reducing the external effects caused by the utilization of landfills in solid waste management. The preferences of the local population in the surrounding areas of a landfill are evaluated utilizing a discrete choice experiment in which subjects are presente...

Climate change policies may compete for scarce economic resources with other alternative policies that might also be needed in tourist destinations. This article studies the economic valuation of tourists of a “carbon neutral” destination policy in the Canary Islands, under the context of joint valuation with potential alternative tourism policies,...

Tourism is a major contributor to CO2 emissions and therefore to climate change. In this article, we look at the relationships between CO2 emissions and tourism in the context of both developed and less developed countries. We utilize a STIRPAT approach applied to a balanced panel data of developed and less developed countries for the period from 1...

This paper compares the differences between the monetary measures of willingness to accept and willingness to pay (WTP) for changes in climate change risk. The empirical evidence comes from tourists in the Canary Islands. The modelling approach utilizes a Bayesian mixture of normal distribution model that allows the authors to consider heterogeneit...

The authors, using discrete choice experiments, study the economic valuation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy measures in sun-and-beach tourist destination demand. They also examine the role of the status quo effect on CSR actions in tourist destinations. The status quo effect occurs because people generally place much more value on...

This paper studies the relationship between corruption and satisfaction in Spain using the technique of anchoring vignettes, which allows for the correction of the scale perception bias between individuals according to their socioeconomic characteristics. The results show that corruption affects pleope's satisfaction, and that this relationship can...

Urban developments can transform adjacent rural areas by degrading their natural resource base and environmental values. In this paper we provide evidence on the implementation of an endogenous sustainable development plan for the rural–urban environment in the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The objective was the generation of endogenous devel...

This paper studies the relationship between corruption and satisfaction in Spain using the technique of anchoring vignettes, which allows for the correction of the scale perception bias between individuals according to their socioeconomic characteristics. The results show that corruption affects pleope's satisfaction, and that this relationship can...

Corruption perceptions are commonly utilized as essential information to measure corruption across countries and regions. In this paper we consider the hypothesis that respondents to corruption perception questions utilize different response scales in their answers, i.e. for identical levels of corruption practices, subjects from one country could...

Tourist satisfaction analysis provides important information that contributes to design public and private policies in tourist services and destinations. However, the responses to tourist satisfaction scales can lead to biased results when comparing tourists from different nationalities and backgrounds, since they might use different internal scale...

Corruption can have an effect on people's happiness and satisfaction, and therefore, can generate a social cost. However, the perceptions of corruption and satisfaction can also vary across subjects, due to socioeconomic and cultural characteristics. This article studies the differences in the perceptions of corruption and satisfaction across subje...

This paper is aimed at studying the dynamics of consumers' preferences for corporate social responsibility. The data come from both a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) and a field experiment conducted in a real market setting. The results show that in a static setting (first month) predictions of a standard DCE study and real market shares are stati...

Tourism destinations are increasingly concerned about global climate change and considering to become involved in the adoption of mitigation policies that reduce global emissions. On the other hand, behavioral sciences have shown that consumers’ choices may be significantly influenced by the way that they are framed. In this article, we test the im...

The valuation of environmental risks is commonly approached with the utilization of stated preference methods such as contingent valuation. In these methods, money is utilized as the scale that reflects the individual's underlying utility function. However, this scale can vary across individuals due to different perceptions on what are the right or...

Nonmarket valuation is commonly applied to infer the preferences of individuals for restoration policies after an environmental disaster. A crucial issue in this task is to determine the appropriate lapse of time after which the valuation techniques should be applied. This study investigates the role of the emotional load in explaining the dynamic...

Gay tourism is seen as an attractive business opportunity for many destinations. However, there is a lack of research at identifying the resources necessary for success in this type of tourism. This work is aimed at filling this gap by using the premises of the resource based view and transfers them to the analysis of territories to identify the va...

El presente trabajo desarrolla una nueva metodología de valoración de la imagen de des- tinos que incorpora dos principales ventajas sobre los métodos empleados hasta ahora: (1) permite disociar la imagen de un lugar geográfico (destino), de la imagen del usuario con la experiencia vacacional objetiva en dicho destino; diferenciando así entre la me...

When making choices, individuals can follow alternative strategies or decision rules to the traditional compensatory utility maximization, raising doubts about to what extent these choices can be used to elicit preferences. In this paper we use a verbal protocol approach to investigate the use of alternative decision rules in discrete choice experi...

Consumers in modern societies are increasingly sensitive to environmental performance by large and small corporations, making it a crucial issue in the overall policy of corporate social responsibility. The objective of this paper is to study the role of environmental performance in the profile of corporate social responsibility as perceived by con...

Terrorism and threats to national security are documented to have impacts on tourism demand. This paper focuses on the short-run impacts of the September 11 attacks in New York on tourist preferences for competing destinations in the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands. The proposed approach is a stated preference model based on two different samp...

Repeated dichotomous choice contingent valuation data are generated from responses to a succession of binary questions regarding alternative prices for an environmental good. In this paper we propose a simultaneous equation model that allows for endogeneity and error correlation across the responses at each stage of the bidding process. The model a...

In this paper we present results on the effect of medical experience on the economic evaluation of health policies utilizing the method of discrete choice experiments. Subjects in two split samples were asked about choice situations involving alternative profiles defined by the attributes of an innovative program for cervical cancer screening. The...

The estimation of economic benefits of health effects through direct methods, such as contingent valuation, presents the problem of preference imprecision. This paper deals with this problem by proposing an elicitation method that allows the subject to state an interval for willingness to pay, without inducing any specific amount as a response. The...

Human preferences for alternative levels of health risks can be heterogeneous. In this paper a flexible distribution approach to model health values elicited with the dichotomous choice contingent valuation method is considered. Rigid parametric structures cannot model sample heterogeneity while imposing strong assumptions on the error distribution...

The valuation of non-market goods involves iterated elicitation questions which obtain more information from the sample respondents and lead to more efficient welfare estimates. In this paper we consider the improvements which could be obtained by utilising a Bayesian MCMC approach to model this type of data. A fully informative prior resulting fro...

La valoración de bienes de no-mercado implica la realización de mecanismos de elicitación iterativos, lo que permiteob tener más información acerca de las preferencias de los encuestados y conlleva a la obtención de estimadores máseficientes de las mediciones del cambio en el bienestar. En este trabajo se estudian las mejoras potenciales que pueden...

Dichotomous choice contingent valuation involves a binary yes/no question that can be followed by a subsequent question in order to obtain more information from the respondent, and leading to more efficient welfare estimates. Estimation methods for these data have mainly focused on classical maximum likelihood. In this paper we study possible impro...

This paper considers the performance of a model of mixture normal distributions for dichotomous choice contingent valuation data, which allows the researcher to consider unobserved heterogeneity across the sample. The model is flexible and approaches a semi-parametric model, since the normality assumption can be removed by augmenting the number of...

The Canary Islands represent a set of mass market tourist destinations evolving in the last decades towards a predominant sun and beach tourism product. In this process environmental resources have played a role in attracting tourism demand, but have also been subject to pressure and transformation. This paper presents results on the valuation of s...

This paper considers the performance of a model of mixture normal distributions for dichotomous choice contingent valuation data, which allows the researcher to consider unobserved heterogeneity across the sample. The model is flexible and approaches a semi-parametric model, since any empirical distribution can be represented by augmenting the numb...

Deep-sea game fishing is an activity that tourists can enjoy at some holiday destinations. This paper presents results on the benefits received by international tourists from big-game fishing in Gran Canaria (Canary Islands). Both the use and the preservation values emanating from the sport-fishing resource are investigated by following the conting...

This paper presents results on the valuation of health risks in the presence of altruism. The contingent valuation method is utilised in a split sample experiment for estimating the private and public values in reducing the risk of flu. Data modelling for the dichotomous choice method follows a Bayesian approach, which accounts for zero responses a...

La estimación de los beneficios de los bienes públicos requiere de métodos específicos para sortear los problemas en la revelación correcta de las preferencias sociales. Los métodos directos basados en cuestionarios, como la valoración contingente, utilizan como elemento esencial algún método de elicitación para obtener el valor individual. Los mét...

ABTRACT: A critical issue in the application of Stated Preference Methods in the context of non-market valuation is the choice of the elicitation technique. The fact that alternative techniques may lead to different preference orderings is indicative of preference reversals. On the other hand, individuals can follow different heuristics in choosing...

Urban developments can transform adjacent rural areas by degrading their natural resource base and environmental values. In this paper we provide evidence on the application of the concept of eco-endo-development as a tool for planning rural-urban environments. This involves the generation of endogenous development in the rural areas by implicating...

The valuation of environmental goods is commonly approached with the utilization of stated preference methods such as contingent valuation. In these methods, money is generally utilized as a scale that reflects the individual's underlying utility function. The objective of this paper is to compare the performance of the monetary scale utilized in c...

Preference elicitation might be subject to uncertainty in the responses, since the individual might not be sure about her preferences and/or some of the aspects of the market construct. In this paper we compare various models that consider preference uncertainty in non-market valuation using stated preference methods. Two elicitation methods (DCCV...

The literature on the economics of health care has witnessed an increase in the acceptance and dissemination of Bayesian methods over the last ten years. Growth has, however, been slower than in other areas of economics and science in general. The present study sustains that this is due to the fact that, for most specialised economists, the perceiv...

La estimación del valor económico de la salud proporciona información útil para la evaluación eficiente de las políticas con repercusiones sobre la salud, como por ejemplo la adopción de tecnologías médicas de tratamiento y prevención, o la adopción de políticas de control de contaminación. La estimación a través de métodos discretos, como la valor...

La estimación de los beneficios económicos de las políticas sanitarias a través de métodos directos, como la valoración contingente, presenta el problema de la imprecisión de las preferencias. En este artículo se aborda este problema proponiendo un formato para la pregunta de valoración que permite a los individuos declarar un intervalo de valores...