Evaluation of recreation benefit by household production function approach

The travel cost method (TCM) is a revealed preference approach to evaluating the recreation benefit. The traditional application of the TCM is to measure the consumer surplus of recreation sites and activities by calculating the consumer surplus of the site as the area below the demand function and above the implicit price. However, TCM has a setup problem of choke price. The purpose of this paper is to propose the evaluating theory of recreation benefit of environmental quality improvements by household production function approach with revealed preference data. Our approach suggested is operational and allows to decide whether the behavior observed and the household production functions are consistent.