(a) Valuation Methods

Coordinator: Jan Barkmann

Many environmental goods, such as clean air, biodiversity or landscape amenities, do not have market value. Non-market valuation techniques are needed in order to compare the value of environmental goods with the value of market goods. Our working group designs and tests advanced methods for the determination of non-market values of the environment and ecosystem services.

The point of reference for the valuation of market goods is welfare economics with its focus on willingness-to-pay as the fundamental measure of value. In marketing research, methods for the quantification of the willingness-to-pay of consumers for different goods and services are developed and applied. Our research group examines how we can use methods borrowed from marketing research to improve the economic valuation of environmental non-market goods. One of the primary research areas is the discrete-choice approach and the choice experiment method. In this method, respondents are asked to choose the best alternative form several environmental scenarios. We examine how choice experiments can be used to evaluate functional ecosystem services that are often little familiar to non-expert respondents.