Comparison between Willingness-to-Pay expressed by a panel of forestry experts and by a sample of non-expert respondents in a pilot survey conducted for a Contingent Valuation Study

This work deals with an empirical analysis aiming to check the possibility to substitute a panel of forestry experts for a sample of non-expert respondents in a pilot survey for a CVM study. This methodology in the case study has focussed on the estimate of the economic value associated with the reduction in wood fire risk in a protected area of southern Sicily. The experiment consisted in carrying out two surveys by means of the same questionnaire with an open-ended elicitation question for WTP’s. The first survey was addressed to a sample of 227 “non-expert” respondents, whereas in the second one 15 forest technicians working in Sicily were interviewed in their quality of experts in forest fire issues. After an exam of the data aiming also to identify protest and/or strategic responses and outliers, various statistical comparisons between the samples were made in order to realise whether they could be considered deriving from the same population. The results from these statistical tests decidedly pointed out the different provenience of the two samples, consequently discouraging from the use of the experts’ panel in the pre-testing phase for the reduction of pre-testing costs.