Antecedent Volition and Spatial Effects: Can Multiple Goal Pursuit Mitigate Distance Decay?

The estimation of choice models that explicitly incorporate economic agents’ goal-related information has yet to receive focused attention from practitioners. Despite recent advances on spatial analysis in stated preference studies, there is still no evidence on how spatial effects interact with goal pursuit. In this study we propose a modelling framework to analyse how goal pursuit influences choices and query whether pursuit of important goals makes individuals less distance-sensitive. We estimate a hybrid choice model with latent variables to investigate the role of goals and distance on preferences for recreational site attributes. We use data from a choice experiment involving selection among different sites in Dolomiti Bellunesi National Park (Italy). Our results show that goal pursuit has a significant effect on site choice probability and that distance disutility is decreased when individuals visit recreational sites due to pursuit of important goals. This result indicates that willingness to pay inferences concerning spatially distributed activities depend crucially on the spatial distribution of motivations for participation.