R Commander Plug-in for Parametric Analysis of Dichotomous Choice Contingent Valuation Data

Description

This package adds menu items to the R Commander for parametric analysis of dichotomous choice contingent valuation (DCCV) data. CV is a question-based survey method to elicit individuals' preferences for goods and services. This package depends on functions regarding parametric DCCV analysis in the package DCchoice. See Carson and Hanemann (2005) <doi:10.1016/S1574-0099(05)02017-6> for DCCV.

Details

This package is an R Commander plug-in package for parametric analysis of dichotomous choice contingent valuation (DCCV) data. It depends on DCchoice (Nakatani et al. 2020) and Rcmdr (Fox 2005, 2017; Fox and Bouchet-Valat 2020). Refer to DCchoice, Aizaki et al. (2014, 2022), and ‘Non-Market Valuation with R’ <https://nmvr.skr.jp/> for a brief introduction to DCCV in R. A manual for this package is available at <https://sites.google.com/view/r4sp/rcmdrplugin>

After successfully installing and loading RcmdrPlugin.DCCV, the R Commander window will appear, and then you will find ‘DCCV’ added to the top-level menus in the R Commander window.

Selecting ‘DCCV’ displays some menu items. When selecting a menu item, the corresponding dialog box opens. The following dialog boxes are provided by RcmdrPlugin.DCCV:

• The dialog box for ‘Collect responses...’ displays three types of dialog boxes to collect user's responses to DCCV questions.

• The dialog box for ‘Fit Model...’ implements a parametric analysis of DCCV data using sbchoice (single-bounded DCCV), oohbchoice (one-and-one-half-bounded DCCV), or dbchoice (double-bounded DCCV) in DCchoice.

• The dialog box for ‘Calculate confidence intervals for WTP...’ calculates confidence intervals for willigness to pay (WTP) from the fitted model using krCI or bootCI in DCchoice.

• The dialog box for ‘Draw survival function...’ draws a survival function of the fitted model using plot.sbchoice or plot.dbchoice in DCchoice.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP20K06251.

Author(s)

Hideo Aizaki

References

Aizaki H, Nakatani T, Sato K, Fogarty J (2022) R Package DCchoice for Dichotomous Choice Contingent Valuation: A Contribution to Open Scientific Software and its Impact. Japanese Journal of Statistics and Data Science, 5: 871–884. DOI: 10.1007/s42081-022-00171-1.

Aizaki H, Nakatani T, Sato K (2014) Stated Preference Methods Using R. Chapman and Hall/CRC. DOI: 10.1201/b17292.

Carson RT, Hanemann WM (2005) Contingent valuation. In KG Maler, JR Vincent (eds), Handbook of Environmental Economics, Volume 2, Chapter 17, pp. 821–936. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/S1574-0099(05)02017-6.

Fox J (2005) The R Commander: A Basic Statistics Graphical User Interface to R. Journal of Statistical Software, 14(9): 1–42. DOI: 10.18637/jss.v014.i09.

Fox J (2017) Using the R Commander: A Point-and-Click Interface for R. Chapman and Hall/CRC. DOI: 10.1201/9781315380537.

Fox J, Bouchet-Valat M (2020) Rcmdr: R Commander. R package version 2.7-1. https://cran.r-project.org/package=Rcmdr.

Nakatani T, Aizaki H, Sato K (2020) DCchoice: Analyzing Dichotomous Choice Contingent Valuation Data. R package 0.0.17. https://cran.r-project.org/package=DCchoice.

Examples

if (interactive()) {
  library(RcmdrPlugin.DCCV)
}

Collect Responses to DCCV Questions

Description

Collect user's responses to DCCV questions.

Details

Three types of dialog boxes are provided to collect user's responses to DCCV questions.

The first dialog box (‘Set Options for Response Collection’) sets four options for response collections:

• Import bid table: Press the button to import a CSV file containing bids to Rcmdr.

• Currency: Select a currency for bids.

• Bid id: Select a bid/bid-combination used for the questions. When selecting ‘Random’, a bid/bid-combination is selected randomly.

• Save to file: When the user's responses should be saved to an external file in CSV format (.csv), check this box.

After confirming all the settings on the first dialog box, press the ‘OK’ button to continue.

A series of dialog boxes (‘Collect Responses to DCCV Questions’) sequentially opens to collect the user's responses to DCCV questions (For SB-DCCV and some cases of OOHB-DCCV, a single dialog box opens). The user is asked to select ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ from the drop-down list box. After making the selection, the user clicks the ‘OK’ button to open a new dialog box corresponding to the next DCCV question.

When all user responses to DCCV questions have been collected, a dialog box (‘Save As’) opens if the ‘Save to file’ option was selected in the first dialog box. This saves the user's responses to an external file in CSV format.

Fit Model to DCCV Data

Description

Fit a model to DCCV data.

Details

This dialog box implements a parametric analysis of DCCV data using function sbchoice (single-bounded DCCV), oohbchoice (one-and-one-half-bounded DCCV), or dbchoice (double-bounded DCCV) in package DCchoice. This dialog box is activated if a data frame is selected as the active data set. For details on the results of this dialog box, refer to the help content for functions sbchoice, oohbchoice, and dbchoice.

GUI elements of this dialog box are as follows.

• Name for model: An R object name into which the results of a fitted model obtained through this dialog box are stored. The default name ‘DCCVmodel.x’, where x indicates the integer number assigned automatically from 1, can be changed following R's rules for naming objects.

• Choice format: A choice format type for DCCV to be analyzed. Select one of the three radio buttons corresponding to ‘Single-bounded (SB)’, ‘One-and-one-half-bounded (OOHB)’, and ‘Double-bounded (DB)’.

• 1st response variable: A response variable for the suggested price in the first stage of an SB-, OOHB-, or DB-DCCV question. Select it from a drop-down list of variables.

• 2nd response variable: A response variable for the suggested price in the second stage of an OOHB- or DB-DCCV question. Select it from a drop-down list of variables.

• Covariates (optional): Variables to be used as covariates in the model to be fitted. Select none or more variables from a list box of variables.

• 1st bid variable: A bid variable containing the suggested price in the first stage of an SB-, OOHB-, or DB-DCCV question. Select it from a drop-down list of variables.

• 2nd bid variable: A bid variable containing the suggested price in the second stage of an OOHB- or DB-DCCV question. Select it from a drop-down list of variables.

• Take the log of bid: A check box for taking the logarithm of the bid variables. When checked, take the logarithm of the bid variable(s) selected by the ‘1st bid variable’ and ‘2nd bid variable’ drop-down lists.

• Distribution: An error distribution of the model. Select one from radio buttons corresponding to ‘Logistic’, ‘Normal’, ‘Log-logistic’, ‘Log-normal’, and ‘Weibull’.

• Subset expression: A logical expression for specifying a subset of the observations in the active data set to be used for the fitting. If necessary, type a valid logical expression into this box.

• Initial parameters (optional): Initial parameters of independent variables (covariates and bid variables selected above) used in the optimization process of fitting a model. If necessary, type comma-separated values (e.g., 0.3, 1.5, -0.9, ...) into this box.

Draw Survival Function

Description

Draw a survival function of the fitted model.

Details

This dialog box draws a survival function of the fitted model using function plot.sbchoice or plot.dbchoice in DCchoice package. This dialog box is activated if the fitted model in the ‘Fit Model to DCCV Data’ dialog box is selected as the active model. For details on the results of this dialog box, refer to the help content for function plot.sbchoice or plot.dbchoice.

GUI elements of this dialog box are as follows.

Title and labels (optional)

• Title: Main title of the plot. No main title is displayed if missing (default).

• x-axis: A label of the x-axis of the plot. A label ‘Bid’ is displayed if missing (default).

• y-axis: A label of the y-axis of the plot. A label ‘Probability of selecting yes’ is displayed if missing (default).

Ranges (optional)

• x-axis: The x limits of the plot. The lower limit and the upper limit are specified in the ‘from’ box and the ‘to’ box, respectively.

• y-axis: The y limits of the plot. The lower limit and the upper limit are specified in the ‘from’ box and the ‘to’ box, respectively.

• Bid from and to: The ranges of bids to be drawn on the plot. The lower bound and the upper bound are specified in the ‘from’ box and the ‘to’ box, respectively. The minimum and maximum bid values in the data set are used as the default lower and upper bounds.

Calculate Confidence Intervals for WTP

Description

Calculate confidence intervals for a willingness to pay (WTP) from the fitted model.

Details

This dialog box uses either function krCI or bootCI in package DCchoice to calculate confidence intervals for a WTP from the fitted model. This dialog box is activated if the fitted model in the ‘Fit Model to DCCV Data’ dialog box is selected as the active model. For details on the results of this dialog box, refer to the help content for krCI or bootCI.

GUI elementsof this dialog box are as follows.

• Name for output: An R object name into which the results are stored. The default name is ‘WTP’. Any name that is valid for R is typed into this box, if necessary.

• Calculation method: A method used to calculate confidence intervals for a WTP. Select one of the two radio buttons corresponding to ‘Krinsky and Robb’ and ‘Bootstrap’. For the details on these methods, see help for functions krCI and bootCI.

• Confidence level: A confidence level used for calculating the confidence intervals for a WTP. The default is 0.95.

• Number of replications: Total number of replications. The term ‘replication’ corresponds to ‘resampling’ for ‘Bootstrap’ and ‘drawing’ for ‘Krinsky and Robb’. The default is 200, which may be small.

• Seed for random number generator (optional): An integer value used as a seed for generating random numbers. If reproducibility is needed, type an arbitrary value into this box.