The importance of ecosystem functions for humankind is well known. But only few attempts have been undertaken to estimate the economic value of these ecosystem services. In particular, indirect methods are rarely used, even though they are most suitable for the task. This discrepancy is because...

Invasive species are one of the main reasons for the loss of biodiversity. Therefore, national strategies are developed to deal with biological invasions. Economic evaluation as a tool of policy advice has to take into account three challenges: (1) reflecting ecological knowledge, which is...

Billions of dollars are now spent annually in the United States and Europe for spatially delineated environmental services such as agricultural landscape management and river restoration programs, yet little is known about the spatial distribution of the benefits from these policies. This paper...

While much effort has been devoted to estimating market premiums for non-genetically modified (GM) food, the results of such research are largely silent about the preferences for the public good aspects, or externalities, of GM food production. For public goods, the closest substitute of private...

Recent ecological experiments suggest that theinterannual stability of ecosystem productivitymay be determined by the diversity of organismspresent in the system. We investigate whethersuch effects of biotic diversity on ecosystemstability may translate into economic valuesand possibly into an...

The primary evidence about the factors determining successful self-governance of common-pool resources (CPR) has come from case studies. More recently, this observational evidence has been complemented by insights from economic experiments. Here we advance a third approach in which the role of...