Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to deal with one of the technical difficulties of private and social cost–benefit analysis, i.e. the choice of the proper cost–benefit aggregation rule (or method) to use, when a private capital investment decision has to be taken or a public project...

This paper tries to answer the following research question: can multidimensional concepts like well-being or sustainability be measured by using a single metric such as shadow prices? The defence of shadow prices is generally based on the pragmatic argument that different dimensions (economic,...