Two recent studies have shown that “cheap talk” is an effective means of eliminating positive hypothetical bias in experimental and field-auction settings. We further investigate the ability of cheap talk to mitigate positive hypothetical bias in a CVM phone survey administered to over 4,000...

Two recent studies have shown that “cheap talk” is an effective means of eliminating positive hypothetical bias in experimental and field-auction settings. We further investigate the ability of cheap talk to mitigate positive hypothetical bias in a CVM phone survey administered to over 4,000...

In a recent study by John Whitehead in 2002 (“Incentive Incompatibility and Starting-Point Bias in Iterative Valuation Questions”), he proposes incentive-incompatibility and starting-point-bias tests for iterative willingness-to-pay questions. We show that if restrictions associated with the...

I derive values of marginal changes in a public good for two-person households, measured alternatively by household member i's willingness to pay (WTP) for the good on behalf of the household, WTPi(H), or by the sum of individual WTP values across family members, WTP(C). Households are assumed...

This study tests the hypothesis that hypothetical bias may not be related to value elicitation; rather it may be a value formation problem. When participants are asked to indicate their willingness to pay for an induced value good, we find no evidence of hypothetical bias for three different...

This paper uses a meta-analysis to explore the relationship between hypothetical bias and the price respondents are asked to pay. For public goods, the results clearly indicate a difference in the price elasticity between hypothetical and actual payment conditions. Since the bias increases for...

The assessment of alternative forest management strategies should account not only for the private benefits to forest landowners but also for the ecological, environmental and economic benefits valued by society. There are a number of empirical valuation methods that may contribute to that...

In this paper we propose a mixture model of willingness to pay distributions for contingent valuation studies. By allowing a point mass at zero, this model nests the conventional model as a special case. We discuss both parametric and nonparametric estimations of the mixture model. We consider...

This thesis deals with valuation of nonmarket goods using contingent valuation and consists of four papers and an introduction to the research area. Paper [I] examines the public benefits from preserving old-growth forest in the submountainous region in Sweden. Specifically, it analyzes a...

Public economics proposed various models that intend to determine the optimal provision of public goods based on individual preferences. To provide decision makers with empirical recommendations, economists thus need to elicit individual preferences, and more precisely the marginal rate of...