1.20. The effects of familiarity on recreational values: application to a recreational site improvement in Chile.

Autores: A. Cerda, L. Garcia, R. Pasten, I. Damino, M. Diaz

ABSTRACT
This article examines the effect of familiarity on people’s willingness to pay for improvements in an urban recreation site infrastructure and water quality. We apply the contingent valuation methodology to two statistical samples in the City of Talca, Chile. The first sample receives writing information about a recreational site improvement while the second sample receives writing and visual information of the site improvement. We find that people who are shown visual illustrations are willing to give more money to support the project than people who are not shown this additional information.

We also found out that, conditional on respondent characteristics and the confidence interval of WTP is lower for people who are confronted with visual illustrations than for the ones who are not. Additionally, users have a greater probability to pay for an improvement and present less protest responses.
Key word: contingent valuation, visual information, sample biases