Measuring the Value of a Public Good: An Empirical Comparison of Elicitation Procedures

Abstract

The problems associated with accurately measuring the value of a public good in an applied setting are considered. The values obtained from hypothetical elicitation procedures are compared and contrasted with those obtained in a marketplace. When hypothetical measurements are elicited in the field, buying-selling discrepancies similar to those predicted by psychological models of behavior are observed. However, when the market-like elicitation process is repeated, values are more consistent with diminishing marginal utility. The authors cannot reject the hypothesis that these individuals exhibit loss- aversion behavior. The marketplace, however, is a strong disciplinarian of limiting this type of behavior. Copyright 1987 by American Economic Association.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 309 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.