The paper focuses on the ongoing debate on non-market valuation, including the valuation environmental goods, and the opportunity to use contingent valuation for policy guidance. In fact, contingent valuation critics argue that reported willingness to pay answers do not reflect real economic...

In many markets insurers are barred from price discrimination based on con- sumer characteristics like age, gender, and medical history. In this paper, I build on a recent literature to show why such policies are inefficient if consumers differ in their willingness-to-pay for insurance...

In this paper, we use a hypothetical choice methodology to robustly estimate preferences for workplace attributes. Undergraduate students are presented with sets of jobs that vary in their attributes (such as earnings and job hours flexibility) and asked to state their probabilistic choices. We...

When modelling data generated from a discrete choice contingent valuation question, the treatment of zero bids affects the welfare estimates. Zero bids may come from respondents who are not interested in the provision of the public good; alternatively, some zero-bidders may be protesting about...

Self-administered rewards are ubiquitous. They serve as incentives for personal accomplishments and are widely recommended as tools for overcoming self-control problems. However, it seems puzzling why self-rewards can work: the prospect of a reward has a motivating force only if the threat of...

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line...

This paper accounts for the value of children and future generations in the evaluation of health policies. This is achieved through the incorporation of altruism and fertility in a “value of life” type of framework. We are able to express adults’ willingness to pay for changes in child...

This paper examines consumer preferences for the attributes of alternative sources of water supply in Chennai, based on a household survey where respondents were given the description of a set of options. Their decision to choose one of the options is examined using discrete choice models....

There is strong evidence that different income groups consume different bundles of goods. This evidence suggests that trade liberalization can affect welfare inequality within a country via changes in the relative prices of goods consumed by different income groups (the price effect). In this...

This paper develops a novel approach to modeling references in monopolistic competition models with a continuum of goods. In contrast to the commonly used CES preferences, which do not capture the effects of consumer income and the intensity of competition on equilibrium prices, the present...