Respondents of contingent valuation surveys may place a null value on the public good, for reasons that differ from a genuine indifference to the good, but that can be interpreted as a "protest": either against the interview, or the public management, or both. A good survey design can...

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...

Selectivity bias caused by protest responses in Contingent Valuation studies can be detected and corrected by means of sample selection models. This paper compares two methods: the Heckman 2-steps method and the full ML, applied to data on forest recreation - where WTP is elicited as a...

We replicate three pricing tasks of Gneezy, List and Wu (2006) for which they document the so-called uncertainty effect, namely, that people value a binary lottery over non-monetary outcomes less than other people value the lottery's worse outcome. While the authors implemented a verbal lottery...

Knowledge of consumer demand is important for firms, policy-makers, and economists. One common tool for incentive-compatible demand elicitation, the Becker-DeGroot- Marschak (BDM) mechanism, has been widely used in laboratory settings but rarely evaluated for reliability at large scale in the...

This paper reports on a contingent valuation study eliciting willingness to pay for a public program for the preservation of lagoon, beach and infrastructure in the island of S. Erasmo in the Lagoon of Venice. A referendum dichotomous choice approach with a follow-up question is used to obtain...

The sample selection model is based upon a bivariate or a multivariate structure, and distributional assumptions are in this context more severe than in univariate settings, due to the limited availability of tractable multivariate distributions. While the standard FIML estimation of the...

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...

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...

Harmful algal bIoom species are the cause of important damages to marine living resources and human beings. These marine species are primarily introduced in North-European waters through ballast water, i.e. water trans-ported across the oceans so as to keep a vessel in balance. Port authorities...