The Willingness to Pay for Property Rights for the Giant Panda: Can a Charismatic Species Be an Instrument for Nature Conservation? Andreas Kontoleon and Timothy Swanson ABSTRACT. This paper presents the results from a contingent valuation (CV) that elicited willingness to pay (WTP) of OECD citizens, for the conservation of the Giant Panda. The study investigates the extent to which such a charis- matic or agship species can be used to promote wider biodiversity conservation. There exists an internally consistent WTP for the purchase of property rights of the habitat required for the conservation of the panda. This WTP is shown to consist largely of the value placed on the ‘‘natu- ralness’’ of the species, implying that the sym- bolic nature of the panda might be a potential in- strument for greater biodiversity conservation. (JEL Q22) I. INTRODUCTION Meta-analyses of the WTP for individual species have found that there exist prefer- ences for a few charismatic species as com- pared to the vast number of less well known species (Metrick and Weitzman 1996; Loomis and White 1996; Loomis and Giraud 1997; Kontoleon 1996). These are species that are immediately recognizable and identi- able by name (e.g., elephant, lion, tiger, panda). 1 Also, they are commonly associated with a particular geographic location or habi- tat (e.g., African savannahs, Indian forests, Chinese bamboo forests). Because of this association between the species and their habitats, these charismatic species are also sometimes referred to as ‘‘agship species’’ (Leader-Williams and Dublin 2000). The representative status of the agship species plays a key role in conservation. For example, most conservation NGOs focus their appeals for funding around the plight of Land Economics  November 2003  79 (4): 483–499 ISSN 0023-7939; E-ISSN 1543-8325 ã 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System a few charismatic species, as in ‘‘adopt an el- ephant’’ appeals. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) previously has selected ten species worldwide on which to base its fund- raising campaign. This organization even uses the subject of our study—the Giant Panda—as the emblem of its general cam- paign for the conservation of natural habitats and systems. Similar practices are followed by governmental agencies that have been shown to allocate disproportionate amounts of conservation funds to a hand full of charis- matic species. 2 This fascination with a few individual spe- cies might be a great boon for general biodi- versity conservation, or it might not. All of the above-listed species are endangered, and The authors are, respectively, research fellow, De- partment of Economics, University College London and lecturer, Department of Economics, American College of Greece; and chair of law and economics, Department of Economics and Faculty of Laws, University College London. The authors would like to acknowledge the - nancial assistance from the China Council for Interna- tional Co-operation on Environment and Development (CCICED) and from the European Commission’s Framework V Program. The authors are grateful for comments to the participants in the BioEcon Workshop on Property Right Mechanisms for biodiversity conser- vation, to Prof. David Pearce, and to one anonymous referee. 1 There is some limited work from the behavioral biology (Lorenze 1978) and cognitive psychology liter- atures (Guilleman 1981; Kabayashi 1990) that tries to analyze the behavioral and psychological reasons why some species have a greater appeal than others. This work has mostly focused on the effects of external char- acteristics of species on human perception. An interest- ing area for further research is to examine the impact of species characteristics and attributes on individual preferences. 2 Considerable empirical support for the predomi- nance of the agship species phenomenon can be found in Metrick and Weitzman (1996), Williams, Burgess, and Rahbek (2000a, 2000b), and Leader-Williams and Dublin (2000). Further empirical research on extent and impact of this phenomenon is warranted.