John Rolfe

Respondents to Contingent Valuation Surveys: Consumers or Citizens (Blamey, Common and Quiggin, Ajae 39:3) — a Comment

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.