Benefit transfer is a procedure by which existing estimates of non-market values are used to evaluate a policy in a new site or resource, the policy site, that is different from the study for which the values were originally estimated, the study site. A benefit transfer may consist of a direct transfer of the benefits estimated at the study site to measure the benefits at the policy site. Another approach consists on applying the valuation function estimated at the study site to the characteristics prevailing at the policy site. Evidences are ambiguous: direct transfers seem to work better and more often than transfers based on exchanging coefficients across sites.

If we are to understand if any of these transfer approaches work, we need to explore further if benefits or valuation functions estimated at a study site give results that are similar to those estimated at a policy site, under controlled conditions. But, the degree of similarity must be analyzed in a meaningful way rather than a purely statistical one, because statistically different measures or benefit functions may not necessarilly mean meaningfully diferent results for benefit-cost analysis. To accomplish this, the direct transferability of benefit estimates and also the transferability of the valuation functions among sport fishing sites in the mid-Atlantic states of the U.S. are tested under almost ideal conditions: We use the same questionnaires, and applied them at the same time to a random sample of the same population of sport fishing angler’s, fishing at similar sites. The decisions are modeled in the same way for each subsample, with the same explanatory variables and modeling approach.

We studied the differences in estimated benefits among sites under two approaches, direct transfers and valuation function transfers. Per-angler welfare effects, as well as the effects over visitation, caused by three different policies, were estimated in each state, and then compared among states to test if benefits estimates are similar. Transferability was tested through statistical tests for the hypothesis that mean estimates are equal among states. The results of these tests suggest that estimating the welfare effects of a policy in one state, by transferring estimates from another state, does not work very well under the conditions of this study. The hypothesis that mean predicted trips, and mean estimated benefits are equal among states was accepted in few comparisons. On the other hand, for the cases where this hypothesis was accepted, there was no apparent consistency in the patterns of transferability, which varied among states depending on the benefit transfer approach used and the policy under evaluation.

However, studying statistically significant differences and absolute variations between mean estimated values could serve to identify lower and upper bounds for the value of a resource at a study site, which could serve as conservative approximations of the value when informal information about the relative worth of the resources at the policy site is available.