Despite two decades of debate, there remains little consensus about what sustainability is, and how it should be achieved. Economists primarily portray sustainability as a macro-level concern, but there has been less attention on the implications of this social objective for policies related to...

This study uses actual payments toward the provision of a public good to compare dichotomous choice and payment card formats. The public good in question is the environmental improvement from wind generation of electric power. We find that willingness-to-pay estimates vary with the elicitation...

This article examines the role of the discount rate in making decisions that will have significant implications for the environment. The authors begin by providing a rationale for discounting in general and by describing the main factors that determine ...

We construct a fishery model which simulates: (a) stochastic population fluctuations and (b) harvest shifts between commercial and sport user groups. This model then assesses, for both commercial and sport harvesters, the bioeconomic impact of an ongoing rehabilitation plan for the yellow perch...

Several contingent valuation studies have found that the open-ended format yields lower estimates of willingness to pay (WTP) than does the closed-ended, or dichotomous choice, format. In this study, WTP for a public environmental good was estimated under four conditions: actual payment in...

Environmental economists have traditionally addressed the issue of choice under uncertainty by applying the expected utility hypothesis. When policymakers face a panel of experts with widely divergent beliefs, the problem may more accurately be described as a case of choice under pure...

Existence values for obscure resources should not be ruled out a priori because consumers have limited time and resources for information gathering. Furthermore, to the extent that environmental "good things" are highly substitutable, existence values must be cautiously interpreted when...

In a recent study, Whitehead (2002) proposes incentive-incompatibility and starting-point-bias tests for iterative willingness-to-pay questions. We show that if restrictions associated with the nature of starting-point bias are not imposed on the ...