As the US pursues health care reform, it is important to understand the patterns in demand for, and opposition to, public provision of medical treatments. Using data from a nationally representative survey, we develop and estimate a utility-theoretic choice model to quantify demand for publicly...

A choice model based on utility in a sequence of prospective future health states permits us to generalize the concept of the value of statistical life (VSL). Our representative national survey asks individuals to choose between costly risk-reducing programs and the status quo in randomized...

For benefit-cost analysis of policies with respect to environmental and natural resources, economic researchers often require monetized values of households’ willingness to pay for reductions in risks to human life and health. I briefly recap some of the main issues in the related task of...

Using a national survey and a discrete choice experiment format, we estimate demand for environmental polices to improve health. We use a richly detailed community-level approach that describes illnesses avoided, premature deaths avoided, policy duration, and the affected population size. We...

"Closed-ended contingent valuation" surveys can be very useful in the evaluation of nonmarket resources. Respondents merely state whether they would accept or reject a hypothetical threshold amount, either as payment for giving up access to the resource or as a fee for its use. The authors...