Personality traits and environmental choices: On the search for understanding.

In this paper we hypothesize that individuals will choose among alternative courses of action for power generation from wind farms according to their personality profiles. Through a factor analysis we found that certain characteristics of personality do indeed have an effect on environmental choice. The study involves an extensive survey based on the Big Five Traits model to find a pattern of choice that will help to better understand environmental decisions and be useful for policy makers to identify target groups and preview reactions to different courses of action. The research is potentially useful for the better preparation and design of publicity material, awareness raising campaigns and information provision for complex or unpopular policies affecting the environment or in environmental education in general. This research is especially interested in shedding some light on how personality is involved in the processes of environmental decision making, despite the limitations of the present study.

Personal traits underlying environmental preferences: a discrete choice experiment.

Personality plays a role in human behavior, and thus can influence consumer decisions on environmental goods and services. This paper analyses the influence of the big five personality dimensions (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness) in a discrete choice experiment dealing with preferences for the development of an environmental program for forest management in Spain. For this purpose, a reduced version of the Big Five Inventory survey (the BFI-10) is implemented. Results show a positive effect of openness and extraversion and a negative effect of agreeableness and neuroticism in consumers' preferences for this environmental program. Moreover, results from a latent class model show that personal traits help to explain preference heterogeneity.

Economic valuation of domestic water uses.

There are many reasons of concern about the quality of water for domestic uses. The strategic goals of water tariffs must include savings, efficient management and equity in order to optimise availability of the best quality water. The main domestic uses of water are food preparation, personal hygiene and household cleaning; not all of them need the same quality, and for some of them there are even potential substitutes. In order to contribute to this debate, we need to know how these different uses are valued by direct users. This article focuses on eliciting values for different domestic uses, using discrete choice experiments. As far as we know, this is the first time that a differentiated valuation per use has been defined. The paper introduces three innovations in the design of the experiment. The design takes into account decisive variables in household water consumption, such as family size, together with the consumption level, and the options offered in the choice task are combinations of different prices for each of the uses. A latent class model with both common and class-specific random parameters is applied to better account for the influence of heterogeneity in the respondents' choices. The results show that the most valued use depends on the consumption level class.