More People Would Visit Yellowstone if it Weren’t So Crowded: Optimal Congestion Pricing for High Demand Protected Areas

We propose a new revealed preference approach to estimate the optimal congestion price for a protected area subject to high visitation. In an exploratory application, we estimated the influence of congestion on the demand for visits to Yellowstone National Park by fitting the predicted to the observed seasonal distribution of trips to the park between 1979 and 2023. Our results imply that if the optimal fee were charged in each month of 2018, total annual visits would have been 22% lower, fee revenues would have been 2.3 times higher, total surplus would have been 7.6% higher, and surplus per visit would have been 38% higher than under the observed entry fee schedule. We also estimated the peak-season entry fee that would leave total annual visits unchanged while maximizing fee revenues, and we examined differentiated entry fees for local and non-local visitors.