The impact of nature documentaries on public environmental preferences and willingness to pay: entropy balancing and the blue planet II effect

In this study, the discrete choice experiment approach was employed in a survey of the Scottish general public to analyze how respondents make tradeoffs between blue growth potential and marine ecosystem service delivery associated with the Mingulay cold water reef complex. Results indicate a higher willingness to pay for management options associated with the highest possible levels of marine litter control followed by the highest possible levels of fish health. Using entropy balancing, a multivariate reweighting method to produce balanced samples in observational studies, we also test the impact that having watched the BBC Blue Planet II documentary series may have had on individuals’ willingness to support marine conservation activity. Whether or not respondents had seen the BBC Blue Planet II series was found to have a significant impact on people’s preferences. Despite this, the willingness to pay (WTP) does not differ between the two groups, suggesting that such documentaries may impact preferences but not the final action of WTP. It is argued that the entropy weighting approach can be a useful tool in discrete choice modeling when the researcher is concerned with estimating differences in preferences between a group of interest and a comparison group.