Assessing irrigators’ preferences for water market lease attributes with a stated preferences approach

We recruited irrigators to participate in a series of stated preference exercises with real monetary payoffs. Four attributes of the hypothetical lease offers varied across tasks: the type of buyer, the management of the water bank, the lease type, and the offer price. Controlling for differences in profits, we find that irrigators are more likely to accept split-season than full-season leases, more likely to reject offers from developers than from the State, and indifferent over bank management. We use these results along with those from a parallel mail survey to predict market participation rates.