Tinkering With Valuation Estimates: Is There A Future For Willingness To Accept Measures?

2002. Funding from EPA/NSF is gratefully acknowledged; all opinons are those of the authors. ©Copyright 2002 by authors. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appear on all such copies. Tinkering with Valuation Estimates: Is There a Future for Willingness to Accept Measures? The contingent valuation method (CVM), conceived in the 1940s and brought into wide use in the 1970s and 1980s, has been used by economists to value a wide variety of non-market goods and services, especially those with public good and non-use characteristics. Carson (2002) notes that over 5,000 contingent valuation studies have been performed. These studies have employed either willingness to pay (WTP) or willingness to accept (WTA) measures (in some cases, both) to elicit valuation measures. The choice of WTP or WTA (and the compensating and equivalent variation measures which underlie them) is indicative of the implied property rights scheme for the good in question; for example, if a respondent has to pay to avoid pollution damages, the implication is that he or