There is increasing recognition of an apparent paradox with respect to certain dimensions of environmental quality. Some measures of environmental quality, with US air quality being the focus here, have clearly improved over time. However, at the same time that this improvement has occurred,...

Benefit-cost analysts attempt to compare two states of the world, the status quo and a state in which a policy having benefits and costs is being contemplated. For environmental policies, this comparison is greatly complicated by the difficulty in inferring the values that individuals place on...

There is no abstract for this book chapter. It outlines one of the commonly used methods of valuing environmental improvements, discussing the implicit assumptions about perceptions that are embedded in this approach