Impacto da comunicação persuasiva sobre a disposição a pagar pela recuperação de um recurso ambiental

Abstract

As environmental issues have been incorporated into economic theory, it becomes relevant to understand the individuals’ preference for natural resources and hence to measure the economic value of those goods. To this end, techniques such as the contingent valuation method (CVM) are used, which has some theoretical limitations like some information bias. Thus, the objective of this article is to evaluate the impact of persuasive communication, through the bias and the amount of information, on the willingness to pay (WTP) for degraded areas recovering. This analysis is relevant, since research and public policies based on this method may be biased with the information, mismatching the actual population demands. This paper contributes to the literature with a new hypothesis testing: the effect of information bias on the WTP of individuals for the recovery of degraded areas found for the CVM. This type of experiment has never been conducted for an environmental resource in Brazil. Given that aim, an experiment was designed with a sample of UFPEL’s newcomers. Based on five scenarios with different biases and amounts of information, the questionnaires were randomly distributed to the students. Our findings point that individuals exposed to biased information presented WTP 8% higher than those from control group, and that ones who received no information about the good presented WTP 12% lower than those who received complete information.