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...

In addition to his role as a consumer pursuing his own interests, an individual may also regard himself as an ethical observer, judging matters from society's point of view. It is not clear which of these possibly conflicting roles respondents in contingent valuation studies take on. This leads...

In traditional cost-benefit analyses of public projects, every citizen's willingness to pay for a project is given an equal weight. This is sometimes taken to imply that cost-benefit analysis is a democratic method for making public decisions, as opposed to, for example, political processes...

In most applied cost-benefit analyses, individual willingness to pay is aggregated without using explicit welfare weights. This can be justified by postulating a utilitarian social welfare function, along with the assumption of equal marginal utility of income for all individuals. However, since...

Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) for public policies assumes ‘consumer sovereignty’, implying that impacts of government projects can be expressed in monetary terms by aggregating individuals’ willingness to pay. However, individuals’ willingness to pay might not accurately reflect...

Environmental cost-benefit analysis (ECBA) refers to social evaluation of investment projects and policies that involve significant environmental impacts. Valuation of the environmental impacts in monetary terms forms one of the critical steps in ECBA. We propose a new approach for environmental...

Social norms and intrinsic motivations lead to voluntary environmentally responsible behaviour even in the absence of environmental policy. The paper shows that the introduction of environmental policy may lead to a reduction of voluntary abatement and sometimes may increase emissions and...

Das Instrument des Emissionshandelssystems (EHS) wird von Umweltökonom:innen an prominenter Stelle zur Bewältigung der ökologischen Krisen sowohl im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs als auch in der Politikberatung empfohlen. Wir arbeiten drei implizite normative Prämissen des Lehrbuchmodells eines...

This paper analyses the efficient management of nonpoint source pollution (NPS) under limited pollution control budget and incomplete information inherent in NPS pollution. By incorporating information acquisition into a pollution control model, it focuses on the tradeoff between data collection...

The Kyoto Protocol sets legally binding emission targets for industrialised countries without accounting for reductions carried out prior to 2008, the beginning of the first commitment period. There exists only one exception, the project-based Clean Development Mechanism where credits accrue...