(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2007) Cook, Frank Chase; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: David E. Buschena.
Private hunting lease agreements offer an example of the private provision (land access) of a public resource (wildlife). Privately owned forests play an important role in wildlife conservation because of land ownership and recreation trends in the United States. The implicit values in hunting lease markets are important to understanding market incentives of wildlife access leasing. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the underlying marginal values of annual hunting leases agreements. In this thesis, the hedonic valuation technique is used to empirically estimate two forms of consumer response: competitive bidding results in the Georgia hunting lease market and consumer response to take-it-or-leave-it prices in a Northern hunting lease market. The Georgia lease regressions use forest stand and regional attributes to predict observed lease prices. The Northern lease regressions use the firm's lease offering price and additional lease information to predict observed consumer response to lease offering prices. The consumer responses for the Northern regressions include lease applications per new hunting lease offering and renewal of pre-existing hunting lease agreements.
