This article highlights some key areas where economics can contribute to the current debate about animal welfare. Production economics reveals that producers will not maximize animal welfare, even if animal well-being is highly correlated with output. Welfare economics raises thorny issues about...

Although estimates of people’s values for public goods are often needed to conduct costbenefit analysis, existing value elicitation methods are prone to a number of well-documented biases. We argue that some of these biases result because people derive utility from the act of saying they are...

Several recent studies have found important differences between behavior in the laboratory and the field. We explore two possible causes for the divergence: social concerns and unfamiliarity with the traded good. Consistent with our conceptual model, we find that people overstated their...

We compare the ability of three preference elicitation methods (hypothetical choices, nonhypothetical choices, and nonhypothetical rankings) and three discrete-choice econometric models (the multinomial logit [MNL], the independent availability logit [IAL], and the random parameter logit [RPL])...

Recent marketing and psychological studies have shown that more choice does not always benefit consumers. This excessive-choice effect (ECE) is examined empirically using food items in four experiments. The first experiment investigates whether people would voluntarily reduce their choice-set...

Economists have long relied on utilitarian principles in carrying out cost–benefit analysis, but such utilitarianism is typically limited to the well-being of humans. Some prominent philosophers have argued such an approach is unjustifiably speciesist, but what are the consequences of...

A relative increase in demand for one type of beef can have one of two potentially countervailing effects: it can cause substitution of one type for another and/or it might expand overall demand. The results of a random parameters logit analysis indicate that regardless of whether USDA Choice or...