This study provides the first contingent valuation phone-mail comparison that meets current standards for response rates, draws from a general population, is relevant to the valuation of general environmental goods, and allows comparisons with actual participation rates. Social desirability...

I compare the price elasticity of economic and political preferences. My central hypothesis is that willingness to pay, whether expressed verbally or through cash transactions, is more price-elastic for economic consumption goods than for public goods. I ...

Ecotourism presents developing countries with growing opportunities for enhancing resource conservation and economic growth, but also raises pressing management and policy challenges. This paper presents a conceptual framework and empirical analysis of the impacts of introducing a differential...

Dichotomous choice contingent valuation surveys frequently elicit multiple values in a single questionnaire. If individual responses are correlated across scenarios, the standard approach of estimating willingness to pay (WTP) functions independently for each scenario may result in biased...

Previous research on incentive responsivness in voluntary land retirement programs has utilized either hypothetical contingent response methods or actual aggregate enrollment data, both of which suffer from potential biases. In this paper, we analyze program participation in the binary-choice...

While a dominated choice involves a situation in which one option clearly dominates another on all relevant dimensions, an asymmetrically dominated choice typically arises where at least two options do not dominate each other and one (but not both) of those options does dominate a third option....

This paper considers how transferring some or all future responsibility for cleanup of a contaminated site affects the current owner's incentives to reduce contamination, given that he anticipates selling his property in the future. The results depend on the probabilities that the parties will...

Unfunded mandates are orders imposed by higher level governments on lower-level governments without providing the funds necessary for implementation. We highlight the following trade-off associated with unfunded mandates: on the one hand, no funding creates a risk of over-regulation by the...

Stated preference surveys often provide ambiguous descriptions of ecological commodities, yielding welfare estimates that have unclear interpretations and cannot be linked to measurable outcomes. This paper proposes guidelines to promote ecological content validity in survey scenarios and...

We consider a policy environment in which an entire industry is faced with possible imposition of an emissions tax if environmental goals are not met voluntarily. We develop a multiple-firm model of pollution abatement in this context. Using the concept of a self-enforcing equilibrium, we...