When economists first turned to applied benefit-cost analysis in the 1930s and 1940s, prices were the only widely accepted measure of benefits. Perhaps surprisingly, economists did not consider measures like consumer surplus, which seemed quite foreign. Consequently, when they turned to...

When economists turned to applied benefit-cost analysis in the 1930s and 1940s, they adopted prices as indicators of benefits. This was consistent with both neoclassical economics (in which prices are marginal values) and institutional economics (which favored a plausible market mechanism to...

Recent tobacco regulations proposed by the Food and Drug Administration have raised a thorny question: how should the cost-benefit analysis accompanying such policies value foregone consumer surplus associated with regulation-induced reductions in smoking? In a model with rational and fully...