Fairness of prices, user fee policy and willingness to pay among visitors to a national forest
Introduction
Since the establishment of the Fee Demonstration Program in 1996 and its replacement by the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act (FLREA) in 2004, the legitimacy of charging fees in Nature-Based Tourism (NBT) contexts has been a controversial issue in the U.S. (McCarville et al., 1996, Reynisdottir et al., 2008). Imposing user fees for access to natural resources has been considered an effective visitor management tool in coping with social and/or environmental impacts (e.g. crowding, poor quality of facilities, or environmental concerns) on protected areas (Cessford, 2000, Manning, 1999). On the other hand, it has also been found that charges for using public leisure services could place constraints on some segments of prospective users (More and Stevens, 2000, Schneider and Budruk, 1999). Therefore, while the user fee policy of the national park and forest system has been justified from an economic perspective (i.e. alternative way to supplement insufficient government budget), the policy has been criticized in terms of social justice (Nyaupane, Graefe, & Burns, 2009). This is one of the main reasons why numerous researchers have studied user fees from social psychological perspectives including fairness, equity, and willingness to pay.
Research has also shown that if individuals agree with the purposes of fee spending (e.g. environmental protection), they are more likely to support user fees policy (Kyle et al., 2003, Vogt and Williams, 1999, Williams et al., 1999). Williams et al. (1999) argued that if people understand benefits from fees paid, they would be more willing to pay. However, Vogt and Williams (1999) found that park users tended to support user fees only when the revenues were used to maintain current service provision rather than to develop new service programs. That is, campers who were given the ‘maintaining’ fee purpose condition generally agreed with the fee purpose more than those given ‘improving’ condition in the experiment.
More recently, Kyle et al. (2003) observed that place attachment can also play a role in the way recreationists respond to fees for public land recreation. They observed that the place identity dimension of place attachment played a significant moderating role in the relationship between visitors’ attitudes toward fee program and spending support. For individuals who expressed an emotional attachment to the resource (i.e., place identity), there was a stronger relationship between their attitudes toward the fee program and their support for spending fee revenue on activities related to resource conservation.
Although this previous work has contributed to building a conceptual framework for understanding the effect of attitudes toward fee program on fee spending support, it has also raised additional research question such as using alternative notions related to attitudes. In their study, Kyle et al. (2003) defined the attitudes as overall feeling about user fees, but did not deal with a fairness aspect, one of the most challenging but important factors influencing attitudes toward recreation fees (McCarville et al., 1996). Over the years, only a few researchers have attempted to empirically test the effect of perceived fairness on attitude toward user fees (Ajzen et al., 2000, McCarville et al., 1996, Park et al., 2006).
Therefore, the main goal of this study is to extend previous research on the moderating role of place attachment on the relationship between attitudes toward fees and spending support by adopting the notions of justice and fairness. Different from previous work, this study proposes a model of price fairness and fee spending support by adding willingness to pay (WTP) because only a few researchers have examined WTP in the context of price fairness in spite of its importance (Ajzen et al., 2000, Schröder and Mieg, 2008). This study also involves testing of a conceptual model in which three constructs (price fairness, spending support, and place attachment) are predictors of WTP. Technically, structural equation modeling (SEM) is used in favor of advantages of SEM which can accurately estimate latent variables by controlling for measurement error in comparison to multiple regression in previous studies. Accordingly, this study has three objectives: 1) to determine a model that better shows the relationships between the proposed antecedents and WTP user fees, 2) to examine the mediating role of spending support on the relationship between price fairness and WTP, and 3) to investigate the moderating role of place attachment on the relationships tested in the model. Based on the study objectives and literature review in the following section, four hypotheses in the conceptual model will be formulated.
Section snippets
User fees
Entrance or user fees in a Nature-Based Tourism (NBT) context have been utilized as effective visitor management tools. From a park managerial perspective, Buckley (2003) argued that user fees generally can change visitors’ behavior by: controlling overall visitor numbers, diverting a particular recreation activity to a specific area, and/or encouraging visitors to reduce individual per capita impacts during particular activities. However, he pointed out that charging fees is only one of the
Study purpose
As noted earlier, this study is in an extension of previous research examining the moderating role of place attachment on the relationship between attitudes toward fees and spending preferences (Kyle et al., 2003). In contrast to this earlier work, we adopt a conceptual framework ground in concepts related to justice and fairness (Fig. 1).
Based on literature review and previous empirical evidences, three latent variables (i.e., price fairness, spending support, and place attachment) were
Descriptive analysis
As shown in Table 1, more than half of respondents were male (58.4%). Most respondents were middle-aged (M = 44.9, S.D. = 13.29), White (95.5%), and educated with some college or graduate school (65.9%). In terms of household income, over one half of respondents indicated living in households with incomes ranging from $20,000 to $79,999 (55.3%).
As displayed in Table 2, both dimensions measured displayed high reliability coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha = .927 and .873, respectively).
To examine the
Discussion and conclusions
In this paper, we attempted to identify the antecedents of willingness to pay (WTP) user fees from fairness perspectives (Ajzen et al., 2000, McCarville et al., 1996, Schröder and Mieg, 2008). Accordingly, our hypothesized model was developed on the basis of a previous work. Multiple-group invariance testing was conducted to examine the moderating role of place attachment in the relationships tested in our model. Our findings offered support for our hypothesized model. We observed a positive
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