Five essays on valuing non-market ecosystem services of natural resources: insights from environmental attitude, perceptions, and choice behaviours

Abstract

This dissertation, Five Essays on Valuing Non-market Ecosystem Services of Natural Resources: Insights from Environmental Attitude, Perceptions, and Choice Behaviors, investigates how behavioral drivers and contextual factors shape the valuation of forest ecosystem services. By combining meta-analysis, contingent valuation, discrete choice experiments, and hybrid choice models, it offers both methodological innovations and policy-relevant insights into the economics of conservation and restoration. The first essay tests the hypothesis that ignoring seasonal variation biases economic valuation of ecosystem services. Using a meta-dataset of 476 Korean observations, robust mixed-effects models reveal that willingness to pay (WTP) rises by 67% in autumn but falls by 18% and 65% in summer and winter, respectively. The results confirm that temporal heterogeneity systematically distorts annualized values if seasonality is omitted. Economically, this underscores the need for dynamic valuation models that align with the cyclical supply of ecosystem services. The second essay examines whether the design of payment vehicles systematically alters conservation values. In the case of the Gotjawal forests of Jeju, contingent valuation surveys with 1,100 residents reveal that entrance fees elicit the highest WTP and policy acceptance, while tax-based mechanisms face strong resistance. This supports the hypothesis that valuation outcomes are not neutral to institutional design, highlighting the economic principle that the incidence and framing of payments critically shape demand for public goods. The third essay explores the hypothesis that public preferences for restoration are heterogeneous and segmented. A discrete choice experiment with 1,021 citizens, analyzed through principal component analysis and latent class choice modeling, identifies five preference segments with divergent WTP patterns. Acceptance declines steeply at higher costs, validating theoretical expectations of downward-sloping demand for public environmental goods. The findings highlight that efficient and feasible restoration policy requires aligning marginal benefits with socially acceptable cost thresholds. The fourth essay advances the hypothesis that latent environmental attitudes exert significant and systematic influence on restoration choices. Using a hybrid choice modeling framework that integrates mixed logit with latent class analysis, the study finds that environmental attitudes explain substantial variation in WTP and improve model fitness. This confirms the economic significance of incorporating unobserved behavioral drivers into preference models, bridging revealed and latent components of choice and extending the frontier of stated preference methods. The fifth essay investigates whether respondents’ choice behavior exhibits systematic deviations from fully rational attendance. Advanced econometric analysis uncovers selective attribute non-attendance and heterogeneous decision types, from deterministic to probabilistic choosers. These results challenge the assumption of fully compensatory preferences, providing empirical evidence that bounded-rationality and cognitive heuristics shape environmental decision-making. From an economic perspective, this stresses the importance of behavioral realism in welfare measurement and policy appraisal. Taken together, these essays demonstrate that the economic valuation of non-market ecosystem services is deeply conditioned by seasonality, payment design, attitudinal heterogeneity, and behavioral processes. The dissertation strengthens the methodological foundation of environmental economics by refining stated preference approaches and integrating hybrid choice models. At the same time, it delivers actionable insights for conservation finance: that socially legitimate and economically efficient policies must reflect behavioral drivers and contextual realities rather than abstract market analogies.