Temporal stability of preferences and willingness to pay for natural areas in choice experiments: A test–retest

•Temporal stability of choices and WTP estimates are tested in a choice experiment.•Choices are consistent for 57 percent of the choice occasions.•WTP estimates are not significantly different for most attributes.•Transfer errors of attributes may cancel out when transferring WTP for policy scenarios.

The main objective of this paper is to test the temporal stability of stated preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) values from a Choice Experiment (CE) in a test–retest. The same group of participants was asked the same choice tasks in an internet-based CE, conducted twice with a time interval of one year without interviewer interference. We examine choice consistency at individual choice task level and transferability of the underlying indirect utility function and associated WTP values. The results show that choices are consistent in 57 percent of the choice occasions. Comparison of the choice models over time shows that the estimated preference and scale parameters are significantly different, suggesting that choice behaviour changed between the two surveys. Differences between marginal WTP estimates for individual choice attributes are statistically significant only at the 10 percent level. However, we show that this can result in significantly different WTP values for policy scenarios. The instability of estimated mean WTP values for different policy scenarios asks for caution when including WTP values in cost-benefit analysis.