This article examines the political economy of preferences with respect to the environment using a new stated preference survey that presents the first benefit values for national water quality levels. The mean valuation greatly exceeds the median value, as the distribution of valuations is...

Four years ago, Magat, Huber, Viscusi, and Bell (2000) reported pretest results that introduced an iterative choice approach to valuing water quality improvements. This paper applies this approach to a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 respondents. We find that the method provides...