Western Australia's Swan River is a complex asset providing environmental, recreational and commercial benefits. Agencies responsible for its management rely extensively on advice from experts, whose preferences may or may not align with those of the community. Using a choice experiment, we compared public and expert preferences for managing the river's ecology and tested the application of budget‐reallocation and personal‐cost payment vehicles. The results indicate that the budget‐reallocation method is a suitable payment vehicle for public and expert samples, although there are some differences to the more traditional personal‐cost vehicles because of different trade‐offs involved. Modelling revealed heterogeneity in preferences. Expert and public preferences were statistically different from one another at the mean, but a significant amount of heterogeneity existed in the populations sampled. The differences in preferences across both public and expert groups suggest that the measurement of public values for the environment is still an important part of the management process, even when experts are providing advice.

中文翻译：

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专家判断和社区价值：西澳大利亚州保护河流生态的偏好异质性

西澳大利亚州的天鹅河是一项复杂的资产，可为环境，娱乐和商业带来好处。负责其管理的机构在很大程度上依赖专家的建议，他们的偏爱可能与社区的偏爱或不一致。通过选择实验，我们比较了公共和专家在管理河流生态方面的偏好，并测试了预算重新分配和个人成本支付工具的应用。结果表明，预算重新分配方法是公共样本和专家样本的一种合适的支付工具，尽管由于涉及不同的折衷，因此与传统的个人成本工具存在一些差异。建模揭示了偏好的异质性。在统计上，专家和公众的偏好在统计上彼此不同，但是在抽样人群中存在大量异质性。公共团体和专家团体在偏好上的差异表明，即使专家提供建议，对环境公共价值的衡量仍然是管理过程的重要组成部分。