Determining the Value of Non-Marketed Goods: Economic, Psychological, and Policy Relevant Aspects of Contingent Valuation Methods

by Raymond J. Kopp (Editor), Werner W. Pommerehne (Editor), Norbert Schwarz (Editor)

Overview

Contingent valuation (CV) measures what is called passive use value or existence value. The CV method has been used to measure the benefits of environmental policy actions. CV measures of economic value rely on choice. In CV studies, choices are posed to people in surveys; analysts then use the responses to these choice questions to construct monetary measures of value. The specific mechanism used to elicit respondents' choices can take a variety of forms, including asking survey respondents whether they would purchase, vote, or pay for a program or some other well-defined object of choice. It can also be a direct elicitation of the amount each respondent would be willing to pay (WTP) to obtain an object of choice or the amount each respondent would be willing to accept (WTA) in compensation to give it up.
This volume is composed of three sections. The first section provides background into the issues underlying the public and academic discussion regarding CV and the reliability of CV estimates of economic value. In addition, this section reviews the theory underlying the measurement of economic value and discusses those aspects of the theory most relevant to CV. The second section focuses on issues that have formed the core of the CV discussions including: sensitivity of WTP estimates to the size of the program offered, tests for theoretical consistency of CV results, and the sensitivity of results to context and numerous other features of the survey and its administration. The final section addresses the application of CV to actual economic valuation tasks and discusses the types of practical problems the CV researcher will encounter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780792399803
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	09/30/1997
Series:	Studies in Risk and Uncertainty , #10
Edition description:	1997
Pages:	333
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.03(d)

Table of Contents

1 Editors’ Introduction.- Background and Theory.- 2 Contingent Valuation: Economics, Law and Politics.- 3 Measuring the Non-Use Values: Theory and Application.- 4 Economic and Psychological Aspects of Valuing Risk Reduction.- Methodological Issues in Contingent Valuation.- 5 Constructing Measures of Economic Value.- 6 Contingent Valuation Surveys and Tests of Insensitivity to Scope.- 7 Cognition, Communication, and Survey Measurement: Implications for Contingent Valuation Surveys.- 8 What do Psychologists Want? Contingent Valuation as a Special Case of Asking Questions.- 9 The Effect of Giving Respondents “Time-to-Think” on Tests of Scope.- Applying Contingent Valuation.- 10 Practical Problems in Contingent Valuation.- 11 Communication Devices in Contingent Valuation Surveys - Experiments with Video1.- 12 Limits to the Applicability of the CV Approach? A Case Study.

Editorial Reviews

These revisions of 11 papers presented at the summer 1994 conference in Bad Homburg, Germany discuss contingent valuation in terms of its relevance to the theory of the measurement of economic value, tests for the theoretical consistency of results, the sensitivity of results to context, problems encountered by researchers, and applications to economic valuation tasks and to policy evaluations of hydroelectric development in Norway and the sighting of nuclear waste repositories in Switzerland. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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