When People Say Yes to Environmental Costs, They May Not Mean It
A new study reveals a major flaw in how governments and companies measure environmental value: survey respondents often misunderstand what they're agreeing to pay for, or change their minds once they realize their answers will drive real decisions. The finding threatens the legitimacy of cost-benefit analyses that billions in infrastructure and policy spending rely on.
Originaltitel: 'I didn't count "willingness to pay" as part of the value': Monetary valuation through respondents' perspectives
<p>A frequent justification in the literature for using stated preference methods (SP) is that they are the only methods that can capture the so-called total economic value (TEV) of environmental changes to society. Based on follow-up interviews with SP survey respondents, this paper addresses the implications of that argument by shedding light on the construction of TEV, through respondents' perspective. It illuminates the deficiencies of willingness to pay (WTP) as a measure of value presented as three aggregated themes considering respondents' <em>unintentionality,</em> their <em>retraction</em> once they understood that their WTP could be decisive in cost-benefit analysis and the inherent <em>incompleteness</em> of WTP. We discuss why the TEV discourse persists, how it conceals rather than reveals broader notions of value and in what ways our results support the development of alternative approaches that truly endorse plurality in environmental valuation and decision-making.</p>