Roy Brouwer, Yichun Huang, Rute Pinto, Diane Dupont (2022). Willingness to pay for water quality improvements of the Great Lakes: A discrete choice experiment. Proceedings of the GWF Annual Open Science Meeting, May 16-18, 2022.

Valuation of water quality improvement is an essential input for making proper policies to implement water quality control in water bodies. It proves supportive information about the benefit that can be obtained, which should be greater than the investments into the water quality protection programs. There are a bunch of researches eliciting water quality value around the world. However, for the Great Lakes, the relevant study has been absent.

This research is based on data obtained from a two-round choice experiment in 2019 and 2020 in the Great Lakes basin. Three versions of questionnaires were used in the surveys. The respondents were asked to choose from various alternatives reflecting different levels of water quality improvement at different costs. A “boatable, fishable, swimmable, drinkable” water quality ladder is applied. We use a mixed logit model to analyze the data with an intention of eliciting the spatially and temporally heterogeneous willingness to pay for the improvement of the water quality of great lakes. The utility obtained from each water quality profile is specified as a function of water quality improvement, perception of the status-quo quality, distance from the lakes, price of the quality profile, and income. The results of the estimations and the tests reveal the average preference of respondents and suggest heterogeneity in preference between Canada and the US and also over time. This research attempts to fill the gap in the literature about the valuation of the Great Lakes water quality and to provide implications for relevant policymaking.

First Author: Roy Brouwer, University of Waterloo
Additional Authors: Yichun Huang, University of Waterloo, Rute Pinto, University of Waterloo, Diane Dupont, Brock University