A model of recreation demand is developed to determine the role of water levels in determining participation at and frequency of trips taken to various federal reservoirs and rivers in the Columbia River Basin. Contingent behavior data are required to break the near-perfect multicollinearities...

Longstanding debate over the appropriate social discount rate for public projects stems from our lack of knowledge about how individual discount rates vary across people and across choice contexts. Using a sample of roughly 15,000 choices by over 2000 individuals, we estimate utility theoretic...

As the US pursues health care reform, it is important to understand the patterns in demand for, and opposition to, public provision of medical treatments. Using data from a nationally representative survey, we develop and estimate a utility-theoretic choice model to quantify demand for publicly...

A choice model based on utility in a sequence of prospective future health states permits us to generalize the concept of the value of statistical life (VSL). Our representative national survey asks individuals to choose between costly risk-reducing programs and the status quo in randomized...

For benefit-cost analysis of policies with respect to environmental and natural resources, economic researchers often require monetized values of households’ willingness to pay for reductions in risks to human life and health. I briefly recap some of the main issues in the related task of...