Working Papers

The WNE Working Papers series has been published by the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw since 2008.

The WNE Working Papers series provides a fast, open channel for disseminating research conducted at the Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw. The papers hosted here are working versions (pre-prints) and may evolve as authors refine their analyses, incorporate feedback, or progress through formal peer-review. What you read is the current version released by the authors, timestamped and assigned DOI/ISSN identifiers to ensure precise citation and version tracking. Copyright remains with the authors, who may, at any time, upload a revised file or add a note directing readers to a later, peer-reviewed publication.

The Working Papers series accepts articles by research employees of the Faculty and publications from conferences organised at the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw. Articles should be original research papers which have not been previously published, on the subject of economics.

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Number of Results 7

WP(22/2026)516. When Risk Information Changes the Trip: Evidence from a Randomized Panel Combining Discrete Choice and Travel Cost Methods

Authors: Czajkowski Mikołaj, Zawadzki Wojciech, Skrzypek Katarzyna, Budziński Wiktor, Ščasnŷ Milan
Coastal bathing delivers large welfare benefits but exposes recreationists to low-probability, high-salience microbial risks that are likely to become more frequent under climate change. Because these risks are largely invisible, behaviour and welfar…

WP516. When Risk Information Changes the Trip: Evidence from a Randomized Panel Combining Discrete Choice and Travel Cost Methods

Coastal bathing delivers large welfare benefits but exposes recreationists to low-probability, high-salience microbial risks that are likely to become more frequent under climate change. Because these risks are largely invisible, behaviour and welfare depend on beliefs and the effectiveness of risk communication. We provide causal evidence on how pathogen-risk information affects preferences and recreation demand using a three-wave panel survey of users of the Gulf of Gdańsk and the Vistula Lagoon (Poland). A stratified national sample identified 3,312 active coastal users in Wave 1 (spring 2024); 2,588 respondents returned in Wave 2 (summer 2024), where they were randomly assigned to receive either minimal information or increasingly detailed pathogen-risk scripts, and then completed a repeated beach-site discrete choice experiment. Approximately one year later (spring 2025), 1,507 users completed a policy-referendum discrete choice experiment on programs combining water-quality improvements, monitoring frequency, and household costs, alongside a repeated travel-cost module capturing multi-day trips and beach outings. Information treatments significantly increased objective and self-assessed knowledge and selectively raised willingness to travel/pay for risk-relevant attributes – especially frequent water-quality monitoring and water-quality improvements – while leaving unrelated attributes largely unchanged. Travel-cost models indicate that information affects trip-taking behaviour, yet the marginal travel-cost sensitivity remains stable, consistent with a demand shift rather than a change in the “price” slope. The results imply that welfare estimates are information-dependent and that credible risk communication can function as a scalable, low-cost complement to traditional coastal health-risk management.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.22.516
Czajkowski Mikołaj, Zawadzki Wojciech, Skrzypek Katarzyna, Budziński Wiktor, Ščasnŷ Milan
Bathing water quality Pathogens Microbial contamination Risk communication Information treatments Discrete choice experiment (DCE) Travel cost method (TCM) Recreation demand Welfare measurement Consumer surplus Climate adaptation Coastal health risks Baltic Sea Poland

WP(5/2024)441. How stable and predictable are welfare estimates using recreation demand models?

Authors: Lloyd-Smith Patrick, Zawojska Ewa
Economic analysis of environmental policy projects typically use pre-existing welfare estimates that are then transferred over time to the policy relevant periods. Understanding how stable and predictable these welfare estimates are over time is impo…

WP441. How stable and predictable are welfare estimates using recreation demand models?

Economic analysis of environmental policy projects typically use pre-existing welfare estimates that are then transferred over time to the policy relevant periods. Understanding how stable and predictable these welfare estimates are over time is important for applying these estimates in policy. Yet, revealed preference models of recreation demand have received few temporal stability assessments compared to other non-market valuation methods. We use a large administrative dataset on campground reservations covering ten years to study temporal stability and predictability of recreation demand welfare estimates of lake water quality changes. Based on single-year models, our findings suggest welfare estimates are temporally stable across years in around 50% of the comparisons. Using an event study design, we find evidence that welfare estimates are stable within a year, that is, for weeks after a change in water quality. Our findings further reveal that having two years of data for predicting welfare estimates in subsequent years improves the prediction accuracy by 22% relative to using a single year of data, but further improvements in the prediction accuracy are modest when including additional years of data. Predictions of welfare estimates are not necessarily improved when using data closer in time to the prediction year. We discuss the implications of our results for using revealed preference studies in policy analysis.


Lloyd-Smith Patrick, Zawojska Ewa
recreation demand revealed preferences temporal stability prediction accuracy water quality welfare estimates

WP(26/2016)217. Understanding the distribution of economic benefits from improving coastal and marine ecosystems

Authors: Pakalniete Kristine, Aigars Juris, Czajkowski Mikołaj, Strake Solvita, Zawojska Ewa, Hanley Nick
The ecological status of coastal and marine waterbodies world-wide is threatened by multiple stressors, including nutrient inputs from various sources and increasing occurrences of invasive alien species. These stressors impact the environmental qual…

WP217. Understanding the distribution of economic benefits from improving coastal and marine ecosystems

The ecological status of coastal and marine waterbodies world-wide is threatened by multiple stressors, including nutrient inputs from various sources and increasing occurrences of invasive alien species. These stressors impact the environmental quality of the Baltic Sea. Each Baltic Sea country contributes to the stressors and, at the same time, is affected by their negative impacts on water quality. Understanding who benefits from improvements in coastal and marine waters is key to assessing public support for policies aimed at achieving such changes. We propose a new approach to account for variability in benefits related to differences in socio-demographics of respondents, by using a structural model of discrete choice. Our method (1) provides a convenient way of incorporating a wide range of socio-demographics as explanatory variables in conditional multinomial logit models without the risk of collinearity, and (2) is more statistically efficient than the alternative, typically used approaches. The new technique is applied in a study which examines the preferences of Latvian citizens towards improvements of the coastal and marine environment quality that could help the Baltic Sea waters of Latvia reach Good Environmental Status as required by the European Union's Marine Strategy Framework Directive. Applying the discrete choice experiment method, we find that overall, Latvians are willing to pay for reducing losses of biodiversity, for improving water quality for recreation by reduced eutrophication, and for reducing new occurrences of invasive alien species. A significant group within the sample seems not to value environmental improvements in the Baltic Sea, and, thus, is unwilling to support costly measures for achieving such improvements. The structural model of discrete choice reveals substantial heterogeneity among Latvians towards changes in the quality of coastal and marine waters of Latvia.


Pakalniete Kristine, Aigars Juris, Czajkowski Mikołaj, Strake Solvita, Zawojska Ewa, Hanley Nick
good environmental status coastal and marine water quality biodiversity invasive alien species eutrophication discrete choice experiment observed preference heterogeneity socio-demographic characteristics hybrid choice model

WP(41/2015)189. Valuing the benefits of improved marine environmental quality under multiple stressors

Authors: Tuhkanen Heidi, Urbel-Piirsalu Evelin, Nõmmann Tea, Czajkowski Mikołaj, Hanley Nick
Many marine and coastal ecosystems are under increasing pressure from multiple stressors. In the Baltic Sea, these stressors include oil and chemical spills from shipping, nutrient run-off from land and invasive species. All of these pressures have b…

WP189. Valuing the benefits of improved marine environmental quality under multiple stressors

Many marine and coastal ecosystems are under increasing pressure from multiple stressors. In the Baltic Sea, these stressors include oil and chemical spills from shipping, nutrient run-off from land and invasive species. All of these pressures have been rising over the recent past. Increasing pressures lead to reductions in environmental quality, which produce negative effects on human well-being. In this paper, the choice experiment method is used to estimate the benefits to people in Estonia resulting from reductions in pressure from multiple stressors in the Baltic.


Tuhkanen Heidi, Urbel-Piirsalu Evelin, Nõmmann Tea, Czajkowski Mikołaj, Hanley Nick
multiple stressors Good Environmental Status marine and coastal water quality choice experiments oil and chemical spills eutrophication invasive species

WP(35/2015)183. Does the number of discrete choice alternatives matter for respondents’ stated preferences? The case of tap water quality improvements

Authors: Czajkowski Mikołaj, Giergiczny Marek, Zawojska Ewa
Contingent valuation is among the most widely used techniques for studying consumers’ preferences. Nevertheless, whether respondents reveal their true preferences in contingent valuation surveys is still the subject of academic debate. The exis…

WP183. Does the number of discrete choice alternatives matter for respondents’ stated preferences? The case of tap water quality improvements

Contingent valuation is among the most widely used techniques for studying consumers’ preferences. Nevertheless, whether respondents reveal their true preferences in contingent valuation surveys is still the subject of academic debate. The existing literature indicates that the truthful disclosure of preferences pivots on the number of alternatives presented in a single choice task. On a theoretical basis, the use of a two-alternative task format has long been recommended because of its incentive-compatible properties, which ensure that respondents’ disclosure of their true preferences constitutes their optimal strategy. However, the empirical literature presents nascent evidence that providing more than two choice alternatives may increase the respondents’ likelihood of finding an option that satisfactorily matches their preferences; consequently, a multiple-alternative task format likely enhances the accuracy of preference disclosures. Furthermore, empirical studies often employ multiple alternatives for a single task because of statistical efficiency gains. The lack of consensus about the impact of the number of alternatives on respondents’ truthfulness when stating their preferences in contingent valuation surveys motivates this study. Using data from a discrete choice experiment, we examine whether willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates depend on the number of alternatives provided for a single choice task. We employ a split-sample design that uses two- and three-alternative formats in a contingent valuation survey of proposed public policies for the improvement of tap water quality (iron and chorine content, hardness) in Milanówek, a town in the Warsaw agglomeration in Poland. Drawing on a generalized mixed logit model with scale heterogeneity, we find no significant differences in the mean WTP values elicited with two- and three-alternative tasks, while the WTP estimates based on three-alternative tasks appear to have relatively lower standard errors compared with two-alternative tasks. This finding indicates that using three or more alternatives per choice task may offer a way to increase efficiency without biasing the results.


Czajkowski Mikołaj, Giergiczny Marek, Zawojska Ewa
stated preference methods contingent valuation discrete choice experiment incentive compatibility number of alternatives field study tap water quality

WP(28/2015)176. Performance of different approaches in international benefit transfer: Insights from a nine country experiment

Authors: Ahtiainen Heini, Artell Janne, Czajkowski Mikołaj, Meyerhoff Jürgen
This paper investigates the performance of different approaches in international benefit transfer using data from identical and simultaneous contingent valuation surveys on marine water quality in nine European countries. The environmental good is sh…

WP176. Performance of different approaches in international benefit transfer: Insights from a nine country experiment

This paper investigates the performance of different approaches in international benefit transfer using data from identical and simultaneous contingent valuation surveys on marine water quality in nine European countries. The environmental good is shared by the study countries, but the countries differ substantially in their income levels and geography. We test the performance of three approaches: unit value transfer, unit value transfer with income elasticity adjustment, and function transfer. We find that at least in the case of international benefit transfers (when respondents’ mean incomes vary) unit value transfer with income elasticity adjustment performs the best, both in terms of mean absolute transfer errors and minimum tolerance levels for the equivalence of welfare measures. We argue that this approach should become a standard for quick and easy benefit transfer, and can serve as a baseline for comparisons with more complicated function transfers.


Ahtiainen Heini, Artell Janne, Czajkowski Mikołaj, Meyerhoff Jürgen
benefit transfer contingent valuation international transfer errors water quality

WP(/2008)9. Study on Benefit Transfer in an International Setting. How to Improve Welfare Estimates in the Case of the Countries' Income Heterogeneity?

Authors: Czajkowski Mikołaj, Ščasný Milan
The paper aims at investigating the validity of benefit transfer in the case of transfers between countries highly heterogeneous in income, and demonstrates relative performance of different benefit transfer methods under these conditions. We examine…

WP9. Study on Benefit Transfer in an International Setting. How to Improve Welfare Estimates in the Case of the Countries' Income Heterogeneity?

The paper aims at investigating the validity of benefit transfer in the case of transfers between countries highly heterogeneous in income, and demonstrates relative performance of different benefit transfer methods under these conditions. We examine how income elasticity of WTP varies in line with the levels of income in order to provide scientifically sound elasticity factor for adjusting transferred welfare estimates. In addition, we have noted that using site-specific measures of income substantially outperforms transfers based on GPD per capita. The results provide conclusions for the future benefit transfers between countries differentiated by income. The accuracy of benefit transfer is compared using equivalence testing following the TOSC test; a new, more informative way of reporting equivalence is proposed and developed, based on computing minimum tolerance level rather than specifying it a priori. The empirical studies are one of the first applications of virtually the same study settings and questionnaires in an environmental quality context, what supplements a few previously existing applications in health effects settings. Lake water quality valuation studies were conducted in two countries in transition - Poland and the Czech Republic - that reflected the earlier studies carried out in Norway and Germany. The use of the same questionnaires and scenarios allowed to control for survey artefacts that could possibly bias the willingness to pay. The welfare estimates collected at four different sites provided a wide base for testing the benefit transfer and comparing the performance of methods to improve the transfer accuracy. Finally, the guidelines for future applications have been offered, as particularly valuable for benefit transfers between countries highly heterogeneous in income.


Czajkowski Mikołaj, Ščasný Milan
benefit transfer income heterogeneity contingent valuation water quality equivalence testing TOSC convolutions economies in transition
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