Societal preferences for the conservation of traditional pig breeds and their agroecosystems: Addressing preference heterogeneity and protest responses through deterministic allocation and scale-extended models

Abstract

We assess preferences of inhabitants of the island of Majorca (Spain) for the conservation of traditional, ex-tensively reared Majorcan Black Pigs and the linked agro-ecosystem, using a choice experiment. Up to 35% of our respondents registered protest responses. We examine alternative methods of dealing with and accounting for these protests. We find that free allocated models report better information criteria estimates but may give rise to interpretation difficulties. Our preferred model in terms of performance and interpretability is a 3-class model where protest responses are deterministically allocated to one class and random parameters are included to account for heterogeneity. Among the non-protesting classes, we find heterogeneous preferences where 40% of the respond-ents are mostly concerned with management and product innovation and 24% more breed-concerned respondents favour price increases in breed-based products to fund improvement of the agroecosystem.