The Travel Cost Method: an empirical investigation of Randall's Difficulty

Randall (1994) argued that the Travel Cost Method (TCM) cannot generate monetary measures of recreation site benefits for use in Cost Benefit Analysis. Randall argues that what is relevant to recreational decision‐making is the subjective, and unobservable, price of travel, whereas TCM uses the observer‐assessed cost of travel. Hence, TCM can at best give ordinally measurable welfare estimates. ‘Randall’s Difficulty’ is formulated as an estimation problem and results are derived for that problem. The meaning of, prospects for, and usefulness of ordinal measurement are explored, and the existence of a solution to Randall’s Difficulty is considered.