On-Site Time in the Demand for Recreation

The standard travel cost model has treated on-site time ambiguously over the years. This paper shows how to handle on-site time by exploring the implications of two assumptions in the travel cost model: first, people choose the amount of time that they spend on a site, and second, the time spent on-site is exogenous. This paper uses a duality result to show that when on-site time is chosen, the standard travel cost demand function takes a particularly simple form. With slight modification, standard estimation and welfare calculations continue to hold.