The monetary valuation of environmental goods and services has evolved from a fringe field of study in the late 1970s and early 1980s to a primary focus of environmental economists over the past decade. Despite its rapid growth, practitioners of valuation techniques often find themselves defending their practices to both users of the results of applied studies and, perhaps more troubling, to other practitioners. One of the more heated threads of this internal debate over valuation techniques revolves around the types of data to use in performing a valuation study. In the infant years of the development of valuation techniques, two schools of thought emerged: the revealed preference school and the stated preference school, the latter of which is perhaps most associated with the contingent valuation method. In the midst of this debate an exciting new approach to non-market valuation was developed in the 1990s: a combination and joint estimation of revealed preference and stated preference data. There are two primary objectives for this book. One objective is to fill a gap in the nonmarket valuation "primer" literature. A number of books have appeared over the past decade that develop the theory and methods of nonmarket valuation but each takes an individual nonmarket valuation method approach. This book considers each of these valuation methods in combination with another method. These relationships can be exploited econometrically to obtain more valid and reliable estimates of willingness-to-pay relative to the individual methods. The second objective is to showcase recent and novel applications of data combination and joint estimation via a set of original, state-of-the-art studies that are contributed by leading researchers in the field. This book will be accessible to economists and consultants working in business or government, as well as an invaluable resource for researchers and students alike.
Focus Groups/In-depth Meetings Focus groups and less focused in-depth meetings are useful tools for considering the attitudes of the general public towards environmental issues (Burgess etal., 1988a; 1988b; Burgess, 1996; Davies, 1999).
In this two volume collection the editors have chosen a sample of some of the most essential and inspirational articles and papers for understanding revealed preference methods to value environmental amenities.
The questionnaire-based Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) asks people what would they be willing to pay for an environmental good or attribute, or willing to accept for its loss. These papers consider the real value of such surveys.
This three volume set provides the key papers for understanding the historical development of contingent valuation, its theoretical and statistical foundations, and the major controversies.
Hensher DA, Greene WH (2010) Non-attendance and dual processing of common-metric attributes in choice analysis: a latent class specification. Empirical Econ 39:413–426. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s00181-009-0310-x Hensher DA, Greene WH, ...
This book provides a systematic review of those economic approaches for valuing the environment and natural resources that use information on what people do, not what they say.
The Stated Preference Approach to Environmental Valuation: Applications
Bringing together leading voices in the field, this timely book tells a unified story about the interrelated features of contingent valuation and how those features affect its reliability.
The book is also suitable as a primary text or supplemental reading in an introductory-level, hands-on course.
This is a practical book with clear descriptions of the most commonly used nonmarket methods.