Willingness to Pay for Land Preservation across States and Jurisdictional Scale: Implications for Benefit Transfer

In stated preference valuation of farmland preservation, respondents are often told that preservation will occur within various jurisdictional scales—that is, community or state—but are not told the specific location of parcels. The resultant availability of welfare estimates for different scales and regions provides numerous avenues for benefit transfer. This paper provides a systematic assessment of transfer error, contrasting different methods for the transfer of farmland preservation values across states and jurisdictional scales. Results drawn from multistate choice experiments suggest that the choice of across scale versus across state transfer method can have significant implications for transfer validity.