Many municipalities across the United States have turned to unit based pricing—also known as pay as you throw (PAYT)—as a vehicle for reducing municipal solid waste generation, increasing recycling, and promoting equity in paying for the service. In this paper, we reevaluate the standard...

An analysis of size and managerial efficiency of northern New England towns in the production of rural road services is reported. A stochastic cost frontier was used as the normative efficiency reference set. Empirical results provide evidence of economies of size in the production of road...

This paper argues that the belief that discrete contingent valuation (CV) questions yield substantially larger estimates of the mean (and the median) willingness to pay (WTP) for nonmarket resources in comparison to open-ended CV questions is unfounded. Monte Carlo experiments estimate the...

A calibration strategy using ridge regression to generate more precise estimates for a particular parameter in a model is proposed. Formulae to compute the proposed ridge estimates from standard ordinary least squares (OLS) results are provided. The strategy is applied to recomputing marginal...

This paper examines and compares objective, scientific measures of environmental quality with subjective measures of individuals’ perceptions obtained from survey information within the context of hedonic property value models. The specific application is to water clarity of freshwater lakes...

The multiple-bounded uncertainty choice (MBUC) value elicitation method allows respondents to indicate qualitative levels of uncertainty, as opposed to a simple yes or no, across a range of prices. We argue that MBUC responses convey subjective probabilities. We examine the decision process of...

This paper uses GIS data to develop variables representing the physical extent and visibility of surrounding land use/cover features in a hedonic model of a rural/suburban residential housing market. Three equations are estimated to determine if views affect property prices and, further, if...

Multiple-bounded, contingent-valuation questions have been proposed as an alternative to single-bounded and double-bounded questions. While the effects of bid design on multiple- bounded responses have not been explored, findings of experimental effects in single- and double-bounded questions...

This paper presents empirical evidence of mode effects in contingent valuation surveys. We conducted an on-site, split-sample contingent valuation survey of visitors to Fort Sumter National Monument, South Carolina. All respondents were told that the survey was being conducted on behalf of the...

A hybrid stated-preference model is presented that combines the referendum contingent valuation response format with an experimentally designed set of attributes. A sequence of valuation questions is asked to a random sample in a mailout mail-back format. Econometric analysis shows greater...