Getting to know you: individual animals, wildlife webcams, and willingness to pay for brown bear preservation

The vast majority of the wildlife valuation literature focuses on entire populations or substantial changes in those populations (e.g., 25% or more). The policy questions that motivated these existing studies differ considerably from the question of values for individual animals. Compensation for poaching incidents or accidental death of individual animals, as well as analyses of regulatory actions affecting a small number of animals, require economic value estimates for individual animals that are almost entirely missing from the economics literature. In the absence of value estimates for individual animals, wildlife managers are forced to rely on proxy measures that have little to no basis in economic valuation. This study presents one of the first applications of contingent valuation focused on the total economic value of an individual animal. In contrast to the existing literature on preservation values, this involves a unique study design to focus the scenario on animals at the individual level. Our valuation study takes place in the novel setting of “virtual tourists” who watch live animal webcams and interact and connect with the good in question. Results suggest that preservation values for individual animals can be quite high. The range of preservation values for one brown bear is estimated at $70–$140 per person based on a parametric spike model and non‐parametric Turnbull and Kristrӧm estimators. The valuation approach illustrated in this article can be useful for collecting compensation for incidents of poaching, destruction of habitat, or evaluating the costs and benefits of regulations.