Willingness-to-pay for an area-wide integrated pest management program to control the Asian tiger mosquito in New Jersey.

Using contingent valuation we estimated the perceived value of an area-wide integrated pest management program for the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, implemented in Monmouth and Mercer counties, NJ. We estimated residents' maximum willingness-to-pay and perceived monetary benefits (willingness-to-pay excluding residents who protested all types of payments) and payment modality through a telephone survey of 51 randomly selected households. The mean (+/- SE) perceived monetary benefits for an enhanced mosquito abatement program was $9.54 +/- 2.90 per capita per year. Most respondents would have been willing to pay through taxes (35%) or charitable donations (6%) starting then, or through one of these approaches in the future (43%), whereas 16% were completely unwilling to pay any additional costs whatsoever. We projected that the perceived monetary benefits to the counties' 1.01 million residents for an enhanced mosquito control program would be $9.61 million annually. Thus, collectively residents perceived monetary benefits of 3.67 times the combined 2008 annual operating costs of the counties' existing mosquito control programs of $2.61 million.