Public Choices and Welfare Estimate under Wetland Improvement Context: Utility Maximization, Regret Minimization or Both?

Effective and accurate assessment of welfare of wetlands and understanding public stated choices could provide valuable information for wetland manager. However, the traditional non-market value evaluation method, choice experiment, is based on a single choice paradigm and ignore the complexity of individual choice behavior. Therefore, this study introduces the random regret minimization (RRM) decision rule except for random utility maximization (RUM), analyzes the performance between utility- and regret-based discrete choice model by the multinomial logit and random parameter models, and further constructs a hybrid utility-regret model to explore how the public make trade-off between wetland improvement attributes including wetland acreage, biodiversity, water condition and natural landscape. The results show that the hybrid utility-regret model has the best fitting, which indicates that respondents adopt different decision rules by characteristics of attributes. Especially, considering only regret aversion or utility optimality misestimates the public’s willingness to pay and public preference for wetland improvement attributes. Thus, to accurately assess the non-market value of wetland, the combination of regret minimization and utility maximization should be considered. Wetland acreage is of the greatest concern to the respondents under the hybrid utility-regret model, which is different from the results of other models where water condition is preferred. This study not only contributes to provide valuable implication for wetland managers to formulate more accurate and effective treatment measures, but also to provide theoretical insights for the development of environment-related policies.