抄録
Option value is willingness to pay for availability of a certain good for a potential consumer, who face with several uncertainty. The present paper tries to evaluate option value of rural festival at community level.
For that purpose, contingent valuation method (CVM) is applied for the non-farm household inhabitants of Kizu in kyoto Prefecture. Consequently average option value in 1993 is estimated at 674 yen per year.
Next, to investigate determinants of a sign of option value, I estimate the bid equations respectively on two data-sets, divided between the samples with positive option value and the others. Then special effort is made towards applying diagnostic tests stepwise to check pathological phenomena of models and to reflect characteristics of data on the models.
The result of the Chow test makes clear that a structure of the two data-sets is different from each other and the bid equations should be estimated on each data-set. From the estimated bid equations, the following points are found out. Only the group of negative option value has determinants such as income and holidays. In the positive group's equation, option valus is correlated with variables that reflect the intensity of preferences for a festival, or the difference of tastes in how to spend his leisure hours.
