The economic value of heritage in England: A benefit transfer study

Abstract Historic buildings contribute an important part of the cultural capital of urban heritage areas. Better understanding the benefits for both users and for non-users can aid efficient allocation of resources to the preservation of heritage. Benefit transfer (BT) is an established cost-effective method for assigning economic values to public goods which have no market price, such as local heritage. BT takes stated preference data (willingness to pay (WTP)) elicited through surveys of relevant populations collected at multiple sites to produce an average or adjusted WTP value that is representative to comparable sites. Yet the empirical record is sparse for heritage assets. Consequently, BT is commonly applied without consideration of the error introduced by the transfer, or by transferring values from single-site studies, which introduces the risk of outlier bias. Our approach simultaneously collects WTP estimates from multiple heritage sites using an online survey tailored to the context of each site. This enables application of a comprehensive range of BT tests to the values obtained. We find that transfer error across the heritage sites surveyed is within accepted thresholds of error, providing confidence in the bank of values for transfer to comparable sites. We provide practical guidance on how the values obtained through our method can be applied by practitioners and government analysts, and outline the trade-offs between bulk data collection of multiple sites in a single category of cultural heritage.