Method And Empirical Study Of Air Quality Value Evaluation Under Uncertain Response Based On Choice Experiment

In recent years,China has achieved remarkable results in accelerating the process of urbanization and modernization,however,the rapid economic and social development and disorderly expansion have inevitably led to increasingly serious ecological and environmental problems,among which regional air pollution is particularly prominent.Serious air pollution not only endangers public health,but also has a great negative impact on the development of various industries such as agricultural production,transportation and tourism.There is an urgent need to introduce practical and effective air pollution control measures to meet public demand.Scientific assessment of the economic value of air quality improvement and clarification of public preferences for air pollution control can provide useful social insights for the formulation and implementation of air pollution control policies.As one of the main techniques widely used in the field of environmental resource valuation,Choice Experiment(CE)is used in this study because it can analyze the characteristics of public preferences for different air pollution control objectives and assess the price that the public is willing to pay to achieve different policy objectives.CE uses questionnaires as a tool to create a hypothetical market,constructs multiple schemes composed of different policy attributes and their levels through experimental design for respondents to weigh and choose,evaluates the value of air quality improvement based on the respondents’ choice information and analyzes the public heterogeneous preferences.However,with the extensive attention and in-depth exploration of CE,the important assumption underlying CE begins to be challenged,that is,the assumption that respondents are familiar with their true preferences and can respond with complete certainty to any decision-making problem in the hypothetical market,in fact out of cognitive burden,lack of attention to environmental goods,and the complexity of questionnaire design often make this hypothesis difficult to match with reality.Although previous studies have explored the sources of socioeconomic characteristics of respondents’ uncertain responses and ways to deal with response uncertainty based on some empirical cases,few studies have focused on the influence of psychosocial factors of uncertain responses,especially the influence of psychological distance,which is an important psychosocial factor,on response uncertainty.Moreover,when respondents’ choices are accompanied by uncertainty,their choice behavior relies primarily on utility maximization or regret minimization is still not reported.Based on this,the following studies are conducted in this paper: 1)to investigate how respondents’ perceived psychological distance(PD)from air pollution affects their response uncertainty in the CE context;2)to identify whether public choice behavior is mainly driven by utility maximization or regret minimization when considering the effect of uncertainty response;3)to assess the economic value of air quality improvement in Harbin City under uncertainty response and analyze the characteristics of public preferences.Specifically,first,based on the Theory of Planned Behavior(TPB),which is widely used in social psychology to explain the general decision-making process of individual behavior,the psychological distance(PD),which is a factor of behavioral influence,is incorporated in TPB to construct the PD-TPB-RU model for explaining the intrinsic psychological influence mechanism of Respondent Uncertainty(RU),and to explore how different dimensions of perceived psychological distance affect the respondent’s response certainty.Then,multinomial logit model(MNL)and random parameter logit model(RPL)for explaining public choice behavior is constructed under two decision rules(i.e.Random Utility Maximization(RUM)and Random Regret Minimization(RRM)),respectively.Based on the model solution results,this study compares the fit and explanatory power of the MNL model and RPL model under these two behavioral decision rules,to clarify the main driving paradigm of public choice behavior under uncertainty response.Finally,based on the above findings and the respondents’ perceived psychological distance to air pollution,two-class LCM model was constructed to analyze the respondents’ preference characteristics for air quality improvement attributes under uncertainty response,and the average marginal WTP of the public or different groups for each attribute was measured according to the corresponding models to analyze the cost effectiveness of air quality improvement in Harbin.The findings indicate that,the degree of certainty of respondents’ response to payment is directly influenced by their behavioral intention,perceived behavioral control,and perceived probability distance,while other psychological elements indirectly influence response certainty by acting on these direct factors.It also confirms that there is an intercorrelation between the different dimensions of psychological distance,i.e.,perceived spatial distance influences perceived social distance,while perceived temporal distance influences perceived probabilistic distance.The choice behavior model constructed based on the regret decision mechanism is superior in terms of fit and explanatory power when the effect of response uncertainty is considered,which indicates that the public prefers to adopt the regret minimization decision rule when there is uncertainty in decision making.Based on the heterogeneous preferences of respondents for air quality improvement attributes,respondents can be divided into two potential categories: environment-friendly(83.43%)and health-concerned(16.57%),and these two groups show significant differences in the perceived psychological distance to air pollution.In addition,based on the results of the CUR-RRM-RPL model solution,the average marginal WTP for each 1% increase in the number of good air days is13.57 CNY/year;the average marginal WTP for each 1-day reduction in the number of heavy pollution days is 17.77 CNY/year;the average marginal WTP corresponding to each 1% reduction in premature death due to air pollution is 11.42 CNY/year;the average marginal WTP for each 1-year reduction in the policy time lag WTP is 29.71 CNY/year.The total benefit of air quality improvement in Harbin in 2021 is about 2.6272 billion CNY,which is about 2.4 times of the total investment of Harbin government in ecological protection(1.09 billion CNY)in the same year,indicating that the investment of Harbin government in air quality improvement is reasonable and has a considerable return on investment.This study clarifies the paths and degrees of influence of different dimensions of psychological distance on uncertainty response,and enriches and improves the important psychological sources that influence respondents’ uncertainty response in CE;analyzes and compares which behavioral decision paradigm has more explanatory power under uncertainty response considering respondents’ uncertainty response,so that value evaluation research has reliable and valid decision hypotheses,and improves the scientific rationality of evaluation methods.It improves the reliability and validity of CE evaluation results by incorporating uncertainty response information into the parameter estimation process of the discrete choice model,which improves the value evaluation results of CE for environmental goods under the traditional complete deterministic response assumption.Overall,this study not only improves and extends the existing theoretical methods of CE,but also provides scientific guidance for the formulation of air pollution control policies that are consistent with the social optimum,and provides theoretical references for the benefit evaluation of other public goods or service projects.