Motives behind willingness to pay

The development of the questionnaire was based on a deductive approach, meaning that the questions were derived from specific aspects of the conceptual framework. The survey items associated with motives behind WTP were all designed as Likert items. For the analysis the Likert items will be grouped per treatment to identify any potential differences between the valuation methods. Table 5-6 provides an overview about the 26 items (last column).

The left column reports the part of the conceptual framework the items were based on, the centre column specifies the conceptual core and the last column states the specific statements respondents were asked to respond to.³⁰ The 26 potential motives behind WTP are clustered into four major topics within the framework: (perceived) utility; We-preferences and I-preferences; identified needs, preferred end-states, and value indicator; and perception of action’s effects.

30 The respective questionnaire can be found in Appendix A – Workshop Materials. All statements were originally formulated in German and translated for illustrative purposes here.

Table 5-6 Overview of potential motives behind WTP asked as follow-up questions

Context Conceptual core Statement

Perceived (dis-)

utility TEV

Use value direct Wolves produce a benefit for me because e.g. I like to watch or photograph them.

indirect Wolves undertake important tasks in nature.

Bequest value Wolves should be preserved for future generations.

Existence value I may never see a wolf, still it is important for me to know that wolves exist.

Option value Wolves should be protected to maintain genetic diversity.

preferences Sympathy Donating satisfies me.

Fairness

Individual scale I considered what would be a fair contribution from myself.

Social scale I considered what would be a fair contribution from everyone.

Existence rights Ethical preferences

Wolves have a value independent of humans and therefore, have an existence right independent of benefits or costs to humans.

Consumer-citizen

Personal (un-)

importance The amount reflects the project’s importance for me.

Societal (un-) importance

The amount reflects the project’s importance for society.

Societal cost scale Wolves cause excessive costs for society.

Individual cost scale Wolves cause excessive costs for me personally.

Individual utility /

self-regarding People affected should bear the cost themselves.

Societal utility / other-regarding

Wolves threaten the existence of traditional livestock farming.

Money used for species conservation should rather be used to help people.

Project’s legitimacy Wolf management does not need any financial support.

Project’s legitimacy Wolves are superfluous in Germany because they are not threatened globally.

Commensurability Money is not a suitable means to protect wolves, a solution should not be linked to money.

Perception of

I do not trust this type of funding but would provide financial support by other means.

Project’s incredibility I do not think that I really have to pay.

Budget constraint I am not sure if I can afford the stated amount.

Realisability of project due to payment

I think that the project can be realised due to the payment.

Source: Own illustration

The theoretical foundation of these clusters is more diverse as illustrated in the second column.

Although, in the table every item is linked to a single cluster and a single specific theoretical background, items may actually cover more than one topic and/or be interlinked as illustrated in the conceptual framework. For example, anthropocentric utilitarianism occurs with reference to the consumer-citizen dichotomy as well as in a more general form with concern of value hierarchies. The general anthropocentric utilitarianism refers to the “traditional” question of how much weight is given to utility of non-human entities. Another example is the category of utility which refers in Table 5-6 only to the TEV, while interdependent preferences in form of Sen’s sympathy are here subsumed under “We-preferences versus I-preferences”, although certainly also links to utility theory exist. Further, it has to be noted that the concepts may be interpreted differently from a narrow neoclassical economic perspective. For example, a competing explanation for fairness on a societal scale (see Table 5-6) would be strategic behaviour.

To further analyse the motives with respect to how they relate to each other and to test the theoretical consistency of the conceptual framework’s dimensionality in form of the clusters, exploratory graph analysis (EGA) (Golino & Epskamp, 2017) was applied. EGA is a relatively recent developed method in the field of psychology, to be precise in network psychometrics.

The implementation was done in R using the EGAnet package (Golino et al., 2020; Golino &

Demetriou, 2017; Golino & Epskamp, 2017). EGA identifies the dimensions in the network as latent variables by firstly constructing a network via estimating the variables’ correlation matrix, followed by the graphical LASSO estimation to obtain the covariation matrix. Then, to identify the network’s dimensions, the walktrap, a random walk algorithm (see Pons & Latapy, 2006), is applied. The advantage compared to other network approaches is that EGA does not only estimate the number of clusters within the network but also identifies the variables within each cluster (Epskamp et al., 2017; Golino & Epskamp, 2017). Further, bootstrap with replacement (Efron, 1979) can be applied in order to test the network’s stability and to address potential sample-specificity of the network. Hence, Bootstrap Exploratory Graph Analysis will be applied in order to test the dimensions’ stability (see Christensen & Golino, 2019).