Petr Mariel

University of the Basque Country | UPV/EHU

This paper addresses an important gap in discrete choice experiments literature regarding the effect of contextual priming on preferences and willingness to pay. Contextual priming arises when the mere context in which a survey takes place–whether interviewees are approached in areas related or unrelated to the target issue under evaluation–can swa...

This study examines the use of hybrid choice models (HCM), also referred to as integrated choice and latent variable (ICLV) models, within environmental valuation studies. The investigation is motivated by the fact that stated preference surveys in this field increasingly incorporate additional data into their modelling, particularly respondents' a...

There are many situations in which one partner must make decisions on behalf of the couple. In such cases, incomplete knowledge about the partner’s likes and desires might lead to suboptimal decisions. This paper investigates whether individuals hold accurate beliefs about their partners’ tastes. In particular, we look at gender differences in know...

The goal of this study is to analyse the vertical and horizontal mismatches of graduates in the Spanish labour market focusing on the effect that a master’s degree has in each of these two mismatches. The analysis is based on the data from the Survey on the Labour Insertion of University Graduates carried out by the Spanish Statistical Office in 20...

Purpose This study analyses the future job characteristics that are preferred by economics and business administration students in three specific regions of Spain, Colombia and Ecuador, and estimates their willingness to accept each. Design/methodology/approach A discrete choice experiment (DCE) is carried out in these three regions. The econometr...

This paper uses a discrete choice experiment to elicit winemakers' preferences towards climate change adaptation options in the Spanish Rioja region. The experiment includes different potential adaptation strategies such as relocation, the use of various grape clones, the installation of an irrigation system, the construction of vegetative or artif...

Taking a holiday trip is a common couple-based leisure activity in which both partners tend to be actively involved. This paper studies the intra-household bargaining for the choice of a vacation destination within couples. We conduct a discrete choice experiment in which we elicit both individual and couple preferences for different hypothetical t...

This paper assesses Spanish households’ willingness to thermally insulate their homes and the drivers that influence such a decision-making process. Stated preference data were collected through a discrete choice experiment (DCE). The final sample of 191 respondents and 1,145 observations was analysed by the use of a mixed logit model, weighing the...

We analyse parental school preferences in two contiguous provinces of northern Spain, which offer very different school choices since only one of them is bilingual. Basque-Spanish bilingualism affects the school system, labour market, and, consequently, family budgets in the Basque Country. In Cantabria, Spanish is the only official language, and E...

Air pollution is one of the most pressing problems in India, taking millions of lives annually. Despite unprecedented air quality deterioration, little is known about individuals’ preferences for air quality improvement in India. As a first step, this study presents results from a discrete choice experiment eliciting the preferences for air quality...

Despite unprecedented progress in developing COVID-19 vaccines, global vaccination levels needed to reach herd immunity remain a distant target, while new variants keep emerging. Obtaining near universal vaccine uptake relies on understanding and addressing vaccine resistance. Simple questions about vaccine acceptance however ignore that the vaccin...

We analyse the preferences of students of Economics and Business Administration regarding the characteristics of a postgraduate programme, and estimate their willingness to pay for each one. We carry out a discrete choice experiment involving students of Economics and Business Administration at five universities in Spain, Colombia, and Ecuador. The...

We explore what researchers can gain or lose by using three widely used models for the analysis of discrete choice experiment data—the random parameter logit (RPL) with correlated parameters, the RPL with uncorrelated parameters and the hybrid choice model. Specifically, we analyze three data sets focused on measuring preferences to support a renew...

Many stated preference studies have shown that individuals’ attitudes play an important role in explaining their behaviour and helping to disentangle preference heterogeneity. When responses to attitudinal questions are introduced into discrete choice models, a suitable approach that corrects for potential endogeneity must be adopted. We use a disc...

The aim of this study was to analyse the determining factors behind parents’ and students’ decisions when choosing upper-secondary schools in Japan and how these factors were affected by the implementation of the new “Free High School Tuition” law introduced in 2010. Public and private upper-secondary schools can be either vocational or academic. T...

Coastal managers are faced with the challenge of managing sites to maintain or improve their quality. The quality of each coastal site is characterized by site attributes that visitors care about. Since coastal managers face financial constraints, it is useful to know which are the site attributes with the highest implicit value for visitors and th...

This chapter outlines the essential topics for developing and testing a questionnaire for a discrete choice experiment survey. It addresses issues such as the description of the environmental good, pretesting of the survey, incentive compatibility, consequentiality or mitigation of hypothetical bias. For the latter, cheap talk scripts, opt-out remi...

This chapter describes and compares suitable software for the analysis of basic and advanced discrete choice models. Software packages are classified into proprietary and non-proprietary, according to the operating system required and modelling capabilities. Abilities of both selected commercial (Stata, SAS and Latent Gold, e.g.) and open-source pa...

This chapter focuses on the calculation of marginal and non-marginal welfare measures. It outlines how the calculation of welfare measures is related to the specified model and the assumptions underlying that model. It further describes how the calculation of these measures is affected by the inclusion of preference heterogeneity, including the inc...

This chapter starts by briefly presenting the theoretical background of welfare economics and introducing key aspects such as the indirect utility function, the expenditure function, or the concepts of compensating surplus or equivalent surplus. Next, it draws attention to willingness to pay and willingness to accept, essential measures in environm...

This chapter discusses aspects related to data collection. It focuses, firstly, on sampling issues and, secondly, on the survey mode. Sampling issues include sample size and the type of sampling that enable precise estimates to be obtained. Regarding the survey mode, discrete choice experiments can be implemented by mail, telephone, face-to-face or...

This paper investigates the relationship between the choice drivers for wine among Chinese consumers with their personal values, using two sets of Best-Worst Scaling data. We first provide a ranking of the personal values and wine choice drivers of the population at hand. We then classify the respondents in terms of their choice drivers by means of...

This open access book (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-62669-3) offers up-to-date advice and practical guidance on how to undertake a discrete choice experiment as a tool for environmental valuation. It discusses crucial issues in designing, implementing and analysing choice experiments. Compiled by leading experts in the field, th...

This chapter concerns different aspects of validity and reliability of a discrete choice experiment. Firstly, it focuses on three essential concepts for assessing the validity of the welfare estimates obtained in the choice experiment, namely content, construct and criterion validity. Secondly, it discusses how the reliability of the recorded choic...

This chapter addresses basic topics related to choice data analysis. It starts by describing the coding of attribute levels and choosing the functional form of the attributes in the utility function. Next, it focuses on econometric models with special attention devoted to the random parameter mixed logit model. In this context, the chapter compares...

This chapter is devoted to advanced issues of econometric modelling. The topics covered are, among others, models in willingness to pay space, the meaning of scale heterogeneity in discrete choice models and the application of various information processing rules such as random regret minimisation or attribute non-attendance. Other topics are ancho...

This chapter covers various issues related to the experimental design, a statistical technique at the core of a discrete choice experiment. Specifically, it focuses on the dimensionality of a choice experiment and the statistical techniques used to allocate attribute levels to choice tasks. Among others, the pros and cons of orthogonal designs, opt...

This paper studies the marginal rates of substitution and Willingness to Pay for holiday trip characteristics. By means of a Discrete Choice Experiment, we specifically examine how much individuals from four cities in Northern Spain are willing to pay for accommodation, mode of transport, travel time and length of stay. We estimate a Latent Class M...

We studied people's preferences to support a renewable energy programme to grow seaweed for biogas production, using a choice experiment. Participants had to choose one among three alternatives, two of which were variations of a seaweed programme and the third was the status quo. The two alternatives were defined in terms of four attributes: the nu...

The random parameter logit (RPL) model with uncorrelated coefficients is a restrictive version of the mixed logit model, but it is one of the most frequently used models for analysing stated choice data in environmental valuation. The body of applied literature using a more flexible version, the RPL model with correlated coefficients, has been noti...

The main motivation for this study lies in the importance sports have in our nowadays society and, more specifically, in the role sport organizations play as merging factor between sports and social relations. The main objective of this study is the analysis of the variables that have an effect on the decision of an individual to become a member of...

Valuation can be used for a wide range of purposes, including informing environmental decision-making, designing and evaluating policies, and acknowledging and raising awareness of the importance of the environment. A promising development in the field of environmental valuation that is receiving increasing attention is the hybridization of stated...

The literature on payments for ecosystem services (PES) applied in regions where indigenous peoples are key social actors has not cast much light on their preferences regarding the framing and design features that such economic incentives should have to ensure their effectiveness. Thus, it is key to find appropriate approaches that can be used to e...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to elicit young economists’ job preferences through the use of a choice experiment (CE). Design/methodology/approach – A CE conducted at a total of five universities in Spain, the Czech Republic and Germany. After estimating a random parameter logit model, the monetary value of the willingness to accept a spec...

In this paper, we study the non-financial employment commitment using the so-called “lottery question”, which asks if you would continue working if you won the lottery. This is the first study that reports results using data from a Southern-European country and this is done both before and 3 years into the recession following the financial crisis o...

Climate change impacts on the hydrological cycle are altering the quantity, quality, and temporal distribution of riverine discharge, necessitating a more rigorous consideration of changes in land cover and land use. This study establishes relationships between different land cover combinations (e.g. percentages of forest – both native and exotic –...

The random parameter logit model has become the dominating model for analyzing stated choice data in environmental valuation. The unrestricted version of the model with correlated random parameters, however, is rarely applied. An important advantage of this specification is that the correlations between the parameters are not restricted to zero. Th...

Endogeneity is an often neglected issue in empirical applications of discrete choice modelling despite its severe consequences in terms of inconsistent parameter estimation and biased welfare measures. This article analyses the performance of the multiple indicator solution method to deal with endogeneity arising from omitted explanatory variables...

Climate change impacts on the hydrological cycle are altering the quantity, quality, and temporal distribution of riverine discharge, necessitating a more rigorous consideration of changes in land cover and land use. This study establishes relationships between different land cover combinations (e.g., percentages of forest – both native and exotic...

Multifactorial survey experiments such as stated choice experiments are used more and more frequently in social science research. In this article, based on an experimental study on ethical and political consumption, we explore the potential of hybrid choice models to explicitly model latent psychological factors such as attitudes, overcoming a poss...

The aim of this paper is to elicit the marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for the improved provision of public goods (PGs) by agriculture in a region of intensive agricultural production, embodying many of the environmental problems related to agriculture within and outside the European Union (EU). Our analysis was based on a participatory approach...

The objective of this paper is to study school choice as a deliberate joint parental decision. This decision is affected by the underlying preferences of the husband and wife. We use survey data from a sample of parents in the metropolitan area of Bilbao (Spain) to estimate a bargaining discrete choice model. The collected data set contains hypothe...

In this study five design dimensions are varied systematically investigating context-induced status quo effects in choice experiments. Additionally, two structural complexity measures, entropy and the number of attribute level changes, are used to capture status quo effects from the similarity between alternatives and the number of trade-offs. A cr...

Hybrid choice models expand the standard models in discrete choice modelling by incorporating psychological factors as latent variables. They could therefore provide further insights into choice processes and underlying taste heterogeneity but the costs of estimating these models often significantly increase. This paper aims at comparing the result...

This paper analyses the Spanish residential demand of a bundle of goods conforming the basic services of the households (i.e. electricity, natural gas and drinking water) in 2012. The analysis is made using a QUAIDS model modified in order to consider the censoring in the consumption of natural gas following the approach of Tauchmann (2010), one of...

This paper analyses the Spanish residential demand of a bundle of goods conforming the basic services of the households (i.e. electricity, natural gas and drinking water) in 2012. The analysis is made using a QUAIDS model modified in order to consider the censoring in the consumption of natural gas following the approach of Tauchmann (2010), one of...

This paper analyzes the Spanish housing demand for electricity, natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and liquid fuels using a QUAIDS model. Since not all households consume all fuels at a time, this model is adapted to consider censored data. The data used belong to the Spanish Encuesta de Presupuestos Familiares (EPF) of 2013. The results in...

This paper analyzes the determinants of parental decisions when choosing schools for their children in the Basque Country, Spain. This choice is studied both in terms of private versus public schooling and also the main language of instruction, using data from PISA 2012 questionnaires. We estimate the probability of a family choosing a certain type...

This chapter estimates the direct rebound effect in residential heating and domestic hot water services in Spain in 2012. The fuels analysed are electricity and natural gas. Contrary to previous research, the direct rebound effect is calculated using, among others, data on unit variable cost of energy, the amount of energy consumed per annum and re...

A recent innovation in stated preference environmental valuation surveys is to acknowledge uncertainty associated with scientific predictions about ecological outcomes, complexity of management actions and potential difficulties in implementing environmental programs. Still little is known about how individuals assimilate and respond to outcome unc...

Landscapes throughout the world are increasingly being altered as a result of human actions and natural processes, therefore necessitating urgent management. Acknowledging this situation, the European Landscape Convention (ELC) was approved in 2000 with the explicit objective of protecting, managing and planning European landscapes. In this paper,...

The aim of this study is to analyse the factors that determine the demand for private health insurance and the use of emergency services in Spain by applying a binary logit model and a count data model with endogenous explanatory variable. The analysis of the demand for private health insurance shows the positive effect of educational level, income...

Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) is an increasingly used valuation method to guide policy-makers in their landscape management decision-making. However, due to time and budget constraints, conducting an original DCE for every single policy decision may not be possible in practice. In this context, meta-analyses are becoming a popular tool for suppo...

Attribute non-attendance in stated choice experiments (CE) has gained attention in literature, with some studies finding that not all respondents attend to all attributes. While the current studies show that taking non-attendance into account can significantly influence survey results, it is not yet clear what motivates respondents to ignore or pay...

In the last few years, there has been a growing body of literature on how to detect and deal with the fact that some respondents seem to ignore one or more attributes in a discrete choice experiments. This paper aims to analyse the performance of two econometric approaches devoted to solve this problem: the stated attribute non-attendance approach...

This paper summarizes the long history of the contingent valuation method, stressing the important dates and events that influenced its economic applications. It reviews the economic theory of contingent valuation, highlights the related survey design, alludes to the econometrics methodology involved and discusses the validity and reliability of th...

The aim of this work is to assign an economic value to health services in the Basque Country. For this purpose, a survey was conducted including a discrctc choice experiment. A Mixed Logit Model has been specified in order to analyze stated responses and obtain economic values. The results indicate that the highest valued attribute of current publi...

One of the main problems that public institutions face in the management of protected areas, such as the European Natura 2000 network, is determining how to design and implement sustainable management plans that account for the wide range of marketed and non-marketed benefits they provide to society. This paper presents an application of a stated p...

Ecosystem goods and services have been brought to the forefront of policy making all over the world. It is acknowledged that these goods and services underpin human well-being. The provision of water resources is amongst those services that have raised more attention, given its unquestionable value and global threats like climatic change. Neverthel...

This paper evaluates the knowledge–capital model (KCM) of foreign direct investment (FDI) as defined by Braconier et al. (Rev Int Econ 13(4):770-786, 2005). The model predicts that there are both horizontal and vertical motivations for engaging in FDI. The horizontal motives regard access to new markets in the case of trade frictions, whereas the v...

The Erasmus Programme for higher education students is supposed to play an important socio-economic role within Europe. Erasmus student mobility flows have reached a relevant level of two million since 1987, boosted in recent years by the enlargement of the programme to eastern countries. Thereafter, it seems that flows have staggered. In this cont...

One of the main problems that public institutions face in the management of protected areas, such as the European Natura 2000 network, is how to design and implement sustainable management plans accounting both for the social cost and benefits of conserving these sites. This paper provides with an empirical application of a discrete choice experime...

This study compares eight different alternatives of detection and correction of Easter and pre-Easter effect. These are two calendar effects, which are usually subtracted from the time series analyzed before its decomposition into trend/cycle, seasonality and irregular part. The proposed alternatives differ by the duration of these effects and are...

Modern forms of energy are an important vehicle towards poverty alleviation in rural areas of developing countries. Most developing countries’ households rely heavily on wood fuel which impacts on their health and socio-economic status. To ease such a dependency, other modern forms of energy, namely electricity, need to be provided. However, the qu...

This paper examines the various tests commonly used to select random parameters in choice modelling. The most common procedures for selecting random parameters are: the Lagrange Multiplier test as proposed by McFadden and Train (2000), the t-statistic of the deviation of the random parameter and the log-likelihood ratio test. The identification of...

There is a growing body of literature acknowledging that respondents to DCE often use simplifying strategies, like ignoring one or several attributes to provide with their choices. Two main approaches have appeared to analyse the impact of attribute non-attendance on welfare estimates: the stated non-attendance (SNA) approach and the analytical non...

An explanation of short-run fluctuations in foreign direct investment (FDI) flows by exchange rate movements is based on a belief that investing foreign companies can buy another country's assets and technologies cheaply when its currency is weak. The idea of a simple model of FDI depending on higher moments of exchange rates is completed by eviden...

The present article reexamines some of the issues regarding the benchmarking of patents using the NBER data base on U.S. patents by generalizing a parametric citation model and by estimating it using Generalized Additive Models (GAM) methodology. The main conclusion is that the estimated effects differ considerably from sector to sector, and the di...

This paper shows that cultural identity may have considerable influence on the WTP to protect natural resources. The Basque Country, the region with the highest ethnic homogeneity in Europe, serves as an example to illustrate how important this issue can be in the environmental valuation of natural resources. The rationale for this influence may be...

The present article reexamines some of the issues regarding the Knowledge-Capital Model that encompasses both horizontal and vertical Foreign Direct Investment. The empirical support for this model is however mixed. This article proposes a new way of estimating coefficients by allowing them to vary over time. The estimation results obtained using d...

Modern forms of energy are an important vehicle towards poverty alleviation in rural areas of developing countries. Most developing countries' households heavily rely on wood fuel which impact their health and social-economic status. To ease such a dependency, other modern forms of energy, namely electricity, need to be provided. However, the quali...

This paper shows that cultural identity may have considerable influence on the WTP to protect natural resources. The Basque Country, the region with the highest ethnic homogeneity in Europe, serves as an example to illustrate how important this issue can be in the environmental valuation of natural resources. The rationale for this influence may be...

En la UE se ha estimado que los costes de la congesti�n representan el 2% de su PIB y que el coste de la poluci�n del aire y ruido supera el 0,6% del PIB, siendo alrededor del 90% de los mismos ocasionados por el transporte terrestre. Ante este hecho y el continuo aumento de la demanda del transporte privado frente al p�blico para los desplazamient...

The present article reexamines some of the issues regarding the Knowledge-Capital Model that encompasses both horizontal and vertical Foreign Direct Investment described in detail in the literature. The empirical support for this model is however a mixture. This article proposes a new way of estimating coefficients by allowing them to vary over tim...

The present article reexamines some of the issues regarding the Knowledge Capital Model that encompasses both horizontal and vertical Foreign Direct Investment described in detail in the literature. The empirical support for this model is however a mixture. This article proposes a new way of estimating coefficients by allowing them to vary over tim...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

In this paper, we empirically investigate the determinants of the governance form of strategic alliances. We use a database with 1,344 worldwide alliances in several industrial sectors. In contrast with previous empirical studies, we find that alliances undertaking R&D activities are more likely to use loose forms of organization (contractual agree...

This paper uses panel data from the German car industry for the estimation of parameters of a demand equation applying different statistical methodologies and paying special attention to advertising variables. Two important conclusions can be drawn. First, advertising plays an important role in this market but its effectiveness depends on its form...

This article reexamines some of the issues raised subsequent to the classical research by Palda (1964). We use a nonparametric estimation method that allows us to incorporate both seasonal and smoothness constraints to estimate the parameters of a demand function using monthly data on Lydia Pinkham's vegetable compound. The analysis indicates that...

En este artículo se presentan tres modelos para representar la satisfacción del comprador de un coche. Estos modelos, en los que se tratan simultáneamente variables manifiestas y variables latentes, se establecen como modelos de Análisis Factorial Confirmatorio dentro del campo de los Modelos de Ecuaciones Estructurales. Se parte de 25 indicadores...

This paper develops a dynamic duopolistic model of advertising and price competition. Advertising accumulates a stock of goodwill which enters directly into the demand functions and both the cooperative and predatory effects of advertising are considered. It is shown that firms invest more in advertising the higher the degree of cooperativeness of...

We compare different combinations of technology and antitrust policies from a social welfare point of view in a non-tournament model of cost reducing R&D with spillovers, for the case of a homogeneous goods duopoly, where production produces pollution as a by-product, firms face an exogenous emissions tax and can also invest in abatement technologi...