Using a contingent valuation survey, people’s willingness to pay for a given risk reduction is found to be much larger when traveling by air compared to by taxi. Follow-up questions revealed that an important reason for this discrepancy is that many experience a higher mental suffering from...

The aim of this paper is to analyze business owners’ expected changes in turnover due to a general smoking ban in restaurants, bars and cafés in Sweden. This is accomplished using a survey mailed out to all 642 restaurants, bars, cafés and nightclubs in Gothenburg. The results show that the...

Complementing market-based policy instruments with conflict analysis approaches provides a wider understanding of market situations and allows to identify minimal requirements regarding needs, power and conflict dynamics. If these are not met, a market cannot be successfully introduced or a...

We show that Rand et al. (2012) and Rand et al. (2014)—who argue that cooperation is intuitive—provide an incorrect interpretation of their own data. They make the mistake of inferring intuition from relative decision times alone, without taking into account absolute decision times. We...

Are fairness concerns of relevance to environmental economics and, if so, are they sufficiently structured to improve analysis in this field? On both of these questions, we answer in the affirmative, arguing that people’s fairness views are based on both general rules and the context, where...

Using the contingent valuation method in developing countries to value mortality risk reduction is particularly challenging because of the low level of education of the respondents. In this paper, we examine the effect of training the respondents regarding probabilities and risk reductions, in...

Since the analysis of a self-enforcing agreement by Barrett (1994) it has been clear that the ratio between the slopes of the marginal cost and marginal benefit functions is conclusive for stability of self-enforcing agreements. For example Finus and Rundshagen (1998) stated: 'it turns out that...

Empirical evidence suggests that people’s risk-perceptions are often systematically biased. This paper develops a simple framework to analyse public policy when this is the case. Expected utility (well-being) is shown to depend on both objective and subjective risks. The latter are important...

We report results from a laboratory experiment that allows us to test the incentive compatibility hypothesis of hypothetical referenda used in CV studies through the public or private provision of information messages. One of the main methodological issues about hypothetical markets regards...

We develop a model that relates self-control and conflict identification to cooperation patterns in social dilemmas. As predicted, we find in a laboratory public goods experiment a robust association between stronger self-control and higher levels of cooperation. This means that there is...