Irrigation Water Valuation Using Spatial Hedonic Models in GIS Environment

Abstract

Hedonic pricing is an indirect valuation method that applies to heterogeneous goods investigating the relationship between the prices of tradable goods and their attributes. It can be used to measure the value of irrigation water through the estimation of the model that describes the relation between the market value of the land parcels and its characteristics. Because many of the land parcels included in a hedonic pricing model are spatial in nature, the conventional regression analysis fails to incorporate all the available information. Spatial regression models can achieve more efficient estimates because they are designed to deal with the spatial dependence of the data. In this paper, the authors present the results of an application of the hedonic pricing method on irrigation water valuation obtained using a software tool that is developed for the ArcGIS environment. This tool incorporates, in the GIS application, the estimation of two different spatial regression models, the spatial lag model and the spatial error model. It also has the option for different specifications of the spatial weights matrix, giving the researcher the opportunity to examine how it affects the overall performance of the model.