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Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies and Planning
The Hedonic Method Of Valuing Environmental Policies And Quality, Philip E. Graves
The Hedonic Method Of Valuing Environmental Policies And Quality, Philip E. Graves
PHILIP E GRAVES
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 an increment to environmental quality. Unlike ordinary private goods, environmental goods are not directly exchanged in markets with observable prices. In this chapter, the hedonic approach to inferring the benefits of an environmental policy is examined.
If The Large Wta-Wtp Gap For Public Goods Is Real (And There Are Good Reasons To Think So) Conventional Welfare Measures Are Simply Incorrect, Philip E. Graves
If The Large Wta-Wtp Gap For Public Goods Is Real (And There Are Good Reasons To Think So) Conventional Welfare Measures Are Simply Incorrect, Philip E. Graves
PHILIP E GRAVES
A robust finding in economics is that decision-makers often exhibit a much smaller dollar willingness to pay (WTP) for an item than the minimum amount that they claim to be willing to accept (WTA) to part with it. The spread between these two numbers is particularly large for public goods, raising serious public policy concerns regarding which number, if either, is appropriate for valuing such goods. A traditional utility maximizing model is presented here that predicts–as both measures are currently calculated–that WTA will exceed WTP, quite plausibly by a substantial amount for public goods. Moreover, it is shown here that …