Breaking New Ground in Heritage Valuation: A Comprehensive Use of Discrete Choice Experiments

Heritage authorities must decide which places to protect, but valuation studies usually examine a single named site. We develop a common way to describe buildings, historic sites and landscapes, and test it in a choice experiment with 1,613 Victorian respondents. The results show higher mean willingness to pay for nineteenth-century age and excellent condition in all three categories, while the value attached to distance differs across them. Images also affect stated values in the later survey designs, although many individual image comparisons remain uncertain. We show how the estimated characteristics combine in an illustrative courthouse profile. A shared set of characteristics makes comparisons possible, but it does not make the monetary values interchangeable or establish that they transfer to new places. The framework can help structure heritage appraisal while making those limits explicit.