Valuing the chances of survival of two distinct Eurasian lynx populations in Poland – do people want to keep doors open?

This survey deals with valuing the social benefits of increasing chances of survival of the two main Eurasian lynx populations in Poland: the Lowland population and the Carpathian one. The populations are exposed to different risks of extinction. Using a discrete choice experiment we examined the influence of the initial degree of endangerment of those lynx populations on respondents’ funds allocation. The results show that instead of investing in the option with the expected higher outcome a main driver of individuals’ decisions regarding the conservation of threatened species seems to be loss aversion. Thus, people seem to try to keep options (doors) open by investing more in the more vulnerable population. Moreover, employing a scale-extended latent class model allowed to detect segments among individuals showing different types of response behavior and therefore improved the accuracy of the willingness to pay estimates considerably compared to a conditional logit model.