Willingness-to-pay to stop an invasive alien species - Information and embedding effects.

Summary

Invasive species present a difficult management problem of how to prioritize which species should be the target of management and how intensive this management should be to reduce their spread. This paper uses data from a stated choice experiment used to elicit the Norwegian population’s willingness-to-pay (WTP) to reduce the potential further spread west and south of the invasive Red King Crab (RKC) from its current range within the Barents Sea. This scenario reflects ongoing management challenges related to this invasive species in Norway. We examine how WTP for managing the RKC depends on whether the management activity is explicitly embedded within the need to manage other invasive species in Norway. Our results show that explicitly reminding respondents that they are only asked about the RKC leads to a downward shift in WTP. Importantly, this shift is only observed for the reduced spread attribute and not for the other environmental attributes, suggesting that the reminder is effective in reducing embedding. Our result is robust to model and utility function specifications.