Policy makers, regulators, public utilities and businesses often want to understand people’s willingness to pay for service or environmental improvements, or how much they value an institution or policy.
Such values can be incorporated within economic appraisals to inform a decision on whether or not a scheme should go ahead, to prioritise amongst schemes, or to demonstrate value for money. More recently, economic values are also used within regulatory incentive schemes.
The core methods used for measuring economic values are the following:
- Stated preference
- Contingent valuation, choice modelling / choice-based conjoint, MaxDiff
- Revealed preference
- Averting behaviour, Travel cost / Site choice, Hedonic pricing.
- Subjective wellbeing valuation
- Value transfer
Increasingly, clients are often also interested in frameworks for capturing and triangulating values from multiple sources.
