The valuation of aircraft noise nuisance is a critical step in effective policy development. The most popular method used to date has been hedonic pricing. However, valuation studies of aircraft noise are increasingly adopting stated preference techniques, most commonly contingent valuation andmore recently stated choice experiments. Such approaches can overcome some of the limitations of the hedonic pricing approach in identifying the influence of socioeconomic and attitudinal characteristics on marginal values in examining the temporal variation in values, e.g. by time of day and day of week; and in providing current values. Clearly these are important issues in policy formulation. Thus far the stated choice approach has been applied only in a small number of innovative studies. The evidence on the variation in values between individuals and the extent to which this variation can be explained was examined. The first part of the study contains adiscussion of enhanced models from a study applying innovative SP techniques to the valuation of aircraft noise annoyance at two European airports.The second part of the study considers the contribution of recent studiesin this area to our understanding of the influences on aircraft noise andto the development and future application of SP in this context. Results are reported from the enhanced analysis of stated preference experiments used to value the annoyance to residents from aircraft noise at two regional airports, Lyon (France) and Manchester (UK). The main surveys took placein 2002 and after discarding those respondents for whose home addresses modelled noise data was not available, data from 403 respondents was used. This study builds on previously reported results on influences on the value of aircraft noise by reporting findings from enhancements to the models.Conclusions are drawn on the potential contribution to airport policy development and the development and future application of SP in this context.
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