This paper explores what a critical commentary on micro principles texts might look like, examining what is to be critiqued and how to do it.

Eighteen empirical studies from fourteen different researchers provide evidence that prepaid monetary incentives have a strong positive impact on the response rate in mail surveys. One of these studies is described here and an attempt is made to generalize from all eighteen about the...

Members of professional groups were much more likely to respond to a mail survey than nonmembers who were also experts in the area (43.7% versus 13.7%). A one-dollar (U.S.) prepaid monetary incentive increased the response rates, and it was as effective for members as for nonmembers (gains of...

Two recent studies have shown that “cheap talk” is an effective means of eliminating positive hypothetical bias in experimental and field-auction settings. We further investigate the ability of cheap talk to mitigate positive hypothetical bias in a CVM phone survey administered to over 4,000...

Under the Spanish conservation law, compensation is envisaged for the damage associated with all actions that reduce the quantity or quality of protected areas and species. This paper provides a tool to evaluate the monetary equivalent of this damage. First, we conduct a contingent valuation...

This paper examines the influence of implicit information associated with the occurrence of avalanches on willingness to pay (WTP) values for a risk prevention of dying in an avalanche. We present results of a contingent valuation (CV) study carried out in Austria in two different periods (fall...

The willingness to pay for a coyote conservation program is estimated using a novel payment-vehicle, based on how many oyotes respondents would be willing to sponsor. This hypothetical scenario mimics an increasingly popular type of actual market. Data from a phone survey conducted in Prince...

How should benefit-cost analysis account for the value that benevolent individuals place on other people's pleasure from public goods? When adding up the benefits to be compared with costs, should we sum the private valuations, the altruistic valuations, or something else? This paper proposes a...