Accounting for the importance of psychological distance in assessing public preferences for air quality improvement policies: an application of the integrated choice and latent variable model.

Assessing public preferences for air pollution control is essential to achieving effective air quality improvement, but the internal psychological factors affecting public preferences, especially psychological distance (PD), have only received limited attention. Therefore, this paper explores the role of PD in assessing public preferences for air quality improvement policies. Compared with previous studies that consider psychological factors in the choice model, this study incorporates PD into the choice model as a latent variable by considering both individual responses to measurement questions and socio-economic characteristics in the integrated choice and latent variable model. The results of this study clearly show that PD significantly affects public preferences for air quality improvement policies. Respondents with close PD had obvious preferences for air quality improvement, while those with distant PD were satisfied with the current situation and reluctant to improve it. After considering PD in the analysis, respondents' willingness to pay for one-unit level change of attributes "heavily polluted days," "good air days," "mortality," and "policy postponement" were respectively 10.3791CNY, 10.9005CNY, 11.0427CNY, 28.3412CNY per year. In addition, the paper also found men and respondents with lower levels of education and higher monthly incomes tended to view air pollution as psychologically distant and thus less willing to improve air quality. It is suggested that policy makers should reduce the PD of air pollution among these people by increasing publicity about the hazards of air pollution. This study not only contributes to the literature on the importance of PD in assessing individual preferences, but also provides constructive guidance for policy makers to assess the public's acceptability of air quality improvement.

Will information interventions affect public preferences and willingness to pay for air quality improvement? An empirical study based on deliberative choice experiment.

Environmental information is a prerequisite for public participation in air quality improvement, and the choice of such participation behavior is influenced by the intervention of environmental information. Nonetheless, there has been insufficient analysis of how information interventions affect public preferences and willingness to pay for air quality improvement. The combination of deliberative and choice experiment is used to explore the importance of information interventions for public participation in air quality improvement, and the changes in public preferences and willingness to pay for air quality improvement before and after information interventions are compared to analyze the impact of information interventions on evaluation results of air quality value. The results suggest that information interventions do alter the preferences and willingness of the public to pay for air quality improvement, significantly increasing the choice certainty of respondents and decreasing the protest response. In addition, women and high-income groups showed a stronger willingness to improve air quality after the information interventions, with 35.15 CNY, 44.07 CNY and 46.75 CNY increases in willingness to pay for improved urban green coverage rate, fewer haze days and reduced morbidity. The combination of deliberative information interventions and choice experiment will help improve the effectiveness of air quality value evaluation, stimulate public environmental awareness and willingness to participate, and the results will aid government environmental management.

Ecotourism and sustainable development: a scientometric review of global research trends.

With the increasing attention and awareness of the ecological environment, ecotourism is becoming ever more popular, but it still brings problems and challenges to the sustainable development of the environment. To solve such challenges, it is necessary to review literature in the field of ecotourism and determine the key research issues and future research directions. This paper uses scientometrics implemented by CiteSpace to conduct an in-depth systematic review of research and development in the field of ecotourism. Two bibliographic datasets were obtained from the Web of Science, including a core dataset and an expanded dataset, containing articles published between 2003 and 2021. Our research shows that ecotourism has been developing rapidly in recent years. The research field of ecotourism spans many disciplines and is a comprehensive interdisciplinary subject. According to the research results, the evolution of ecotourism can be roughly divided into three phases: human disturbance, ecosystem services and sustainable development. It could be concluded that it has entered the third stage of Shneider's four-stage theory of scientific discipline. The research not only identifies the main clusters and their advance in ecotourism research based on high impact citations and research frontier formed by citations, but also presents readers with new insights through intuitive visual images. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10668-022-02190-0.

Can respondent uncertainty be ignored when exploring heterogeneity in public preferences for air pollution treatment policies? Comparative results from choice experiment analysis.

Based on choice experiment (CE), evaluating the public's heterogeneous preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for air pollution treatment policies can provide useful social views for the reasonable formulation of treatment schemes. However, the application of CE contains an implicit assumption that respondents understand their real preferences and can make choices with complete certainty. In reality, for a variety of reasons, not all respondents are absolutely certain about their responses, this assumption distinctly is hard to be consistent with reality. To explore the impact of respondent uncertainty on the public's WTP and heterogeneous preferences for air pollution treatment policies, this study introduces the critical point and exponential weighting methods to deal with this uncertainty in the context of CE and conducts comparative analysis based on the random parameters logit (RPL) and latent classes models (LCM). The results show that, ignoring uncertainty leads to distortions in the public's WTP and preference characteristics. In the RPL models, on average, the WTP for attributes is overstated by 32.10%. Our results also reveal that, whether to consider uncertainty does not affect the ranking of the implicit prices of these attributes. After incorporating uncertainty into the analysis, respondents were divided into two potential groups with different preferences, namely the environment-focused group (79.44%) and the price-focused group (20.56%), which is quite distinct from research results of ignoring the uncertainty. Contribution of this study is not only to provide theoretical insights for exploring the effects of uncertainty on public preferences based on CE, but also to provide valuable guidance for policy makers to formulate more accurate and effective treatment measures.