Premium
RESPONDENTS TO CONTINGENT VALUATION SURVEYS: CONSUMERS OR CITIZENS (BLAMEY, COMMON AND QUIGGIN, AJAE 39:3) — A COMMENT
Author(s) -
Rolfe John,
Bennett Jeffrey W.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
australian journal of agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.683
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-8489
pISSN - 0004-9395
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8489.1996.tb00559.x
Subject(s) - contingent valuation , valuation (finance) , value (mathematics) , identification (biology) , social psychology , economics , positive economics , public economics , psychology , sociology , actuarial science , willingness to pay , microeconomics , accounting , statistics , botany , biology , mathematics
Blarney, Common and Quiggin (1995) (BCQ) suggest that responses to contingent valuation (CV) questionnaires may be framed either according to the extent of individual benefits received, or according to wider views about ethical frameworks, impacts on other people, or desired societal levels. They characterise the individual benefit approach as a consumer model, and responses indicating wider concerns as citizen preferences. Citizen value responses are held to invalidate the economic assumptions underlying the use of CV. Hence, they hypothesize that the incorporation of CV results into benefit‐cost analysis is problematic. In this comment we suggest that there are several flaws with the citizen value hypothesis. These can be grouped into arguments about the existence of citizen values based on ethical or altruistic grounds, and arguments about the identification of citizen values.