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Comparing Group Deliberation To Other Forms Of Preference Aggregation In Valuing Ecosystem Services, Mackenzie B. Murphy, Georgia Mayrommati, Varun Rao Mallampalli, Richard B. Howarth, Mark E. Borsuk

New Hampshire EPSCoR

Deliberative methods for valuing ecosystem services are hypothesized to yield group preferences that differ systematically from those that would be obtained through calculative aggregation of the preferences of participating individuals. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the group consensus results of structured deliberations against a variety of aggregation methods applied to individual participant preferences that were elicited both before and after the deliberations. Participants were also asked about their perceptions of the deliberative process, which we used to assess their ability to detect preference changes and identify the causes of any changes. For five of the seven groups tested, the …