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...

We show in a theoretical model that benefits of allocating additional attention to evaluating the marginal attribute with in choice set depend upon the expected utility loss from making a suboptimal choice as a result of ignoring that incremental attribute. Guided by this analysis, we then...

Stated preference (SP) survey methods have been used increasingly to assess willingness to pay for a wide variety of non-market goods and services, including reductions in risks to life and health. Poorly designed SP studies are subject to a number of well-known biases, but many of these biases...

As the U.S. contemplates health care reform that may involve more publicly provided health services, it is important to understand the likely patterns in public support for, and opposition to, public provision of treatments that increase recoveries and reduce deaths. We find that support (and...

Researchers acknowledge several reasons for possible non-representativeness in surveys conducted on samples drawn from large consumer panels. We model the selection process for one major consumer panel, maintained by Knowledge Networks, Inc., starting with over 525,000 random-digit-dialed...

Researchers using survey data must always deal with the problem of nonignorable non-response among the intended sample for a survey. Often, nothing more is known about a non-respondent individual or household other than the geographic location of their primary residence. However, this...

Hedonic Property Value (HPV) models generally consider socio-demographic factors as exogenous in the determination of housing values. We present a descriptive model that shows evidence that contradicts this maintained hypothesis in the HPV literature. Cross-sectional statistical analyses cannot...

Certain sociodemographic groups often seem to be relatively more concentrated near environmental hazards than in the surrounding community. It is well-known that snapshot cross-sectional statistical analyses cannot reveal how residential mobility for these different groups reacts to changing...

Willingness to pay for climate change mitigation depends on people's perceptions about just how bad things will get if nothing is done. Individual subjective distributions for future climate conditions are combined with stated preference discrete choice data over alternative climate policies to...

In hedonic property value models, economists typically assume that changing perceptions of environmental risk should be captured by changes in housing prices. However, for long-lived environmental problems, we find that many other features of neighborhoods seem to change as well, because...