Suchergebnisse

During recent years, the contingent valuation (CV) method has been widely used to value non‐marketed goods and services. We present the results of a CV study of the value of road safety. We find that stated preferences for road safety exhibit considerable imprecision, appear subject to various systematic biases, and are insensitive to variations in the quantity and quality of the safety improvements concerned. One broad implication of these findings may be that, for an important class of goods (of which safety is one example), standard assumptions about the structure of people's preferences may be much too strong. A more specific implication, concerning the design and conduct of CV surveys, is that the NOAA Panel's widely cited blueprint for 'good CV practice' may rely far too heavily on assumptions about the precision and sensitivity of people's preferences.

Plott and Zeiler (2005) report that the willingness-to-pay/willingness-to-accept disparity is absent for mugs in a particular experimental setting, designed to neutralize misconceptions about the procedures used to elicit valuations. This result has received sustained attention in the literature. However, other data from that same study, not published in that paper, exhibit a significant and persistent disparity when the same experimental procedures are applied to lotteries. We report new data confirming both results, thereby suggesting that the presence or absence of a disparity may be a more complex issue than some may have supposed. (JEL C91, D12, D81, D83)