resolving differences in willingness to pay and willingness to accept reply gwendolyn c morrison 1997 raises a logical point regarding our experimental test of the divergence between willingness to pay wtp and willingness to accept wta measures of economic value shogren et al 1994 she argues that our design does not provide a true test of the existence of a fundamental endowment effect since we did not control for the potential of a pivoting indifference map daniel kahneman et al 1990 she concludes that even though our ev idence shows that the mean wtp and wta bids for market goods with close substitutes e g candy bars and coffee mugs converge after market experience the endowment effect might still be alive and well albeit at statisti cally insignificant levels

how do fiscal and technology shocks affect real exchange rates new evidence for the united states abstract using vector autoregressions on u s time series relative to an aggregate of industrialized countries this paper provides new evidence on the dynamic effects of government spending and technology shocks on the real exchange rate and the terms of trade to achieve identification we derive robust restrictions on the sign of several impulse responses from a two country general equilibrium model we find that both the real exchange rate and the terms of trade whose responses are left unrestricted depreciate in response to expansionary government spending shocks and appreciate in response to positive technology shocks

valuing water supply reliability instead of creating water supply systems that fully insulate mankind from climate imposed water deficiencies it is possible that for municipal water systems a nonzero probability of water supply shortfall is efficient perfect water supply reliability meaning no chance of future shortfall is not optimal when water development costs are high designing an efficient strategy requires an assessment of consumer preferences pertaining to the reliability of water supply contingent valuations of both current and future shortfalls are reported the consistency of these measures is gauged using an expected utility model copyright 2000 oxford university press

moral dimensions of the wta wtp disparity an experimental examination abstract contrary to welfare economic theory empirical evidence suggests that the amount of money people are willing to accept wta to forego a commodity will generally exceed the amount of money they are willing to pay wtp to gain the commodity this paper undertakes an experimental examination of the wta wtp disparity using conventional and ecologically produced eggs the results of this experiment reveal that the difference between the mean wtp and wta for conventional eggs is negligible while the mean wta is more than 1 5 times higher than the mean wtp in the case of ecological eggs an explanation for this result is offered following the boyce et al boyce r b brown t c mcclelland g h peterson g l schulze w d 1992 an experimental examination of intrinsic values as a source of the wta wtp disparity am econ rev 82 1366 1373 notion that an asymmetrical assignment of moral responsibility may cause wta to exceed wtp by comparing the two studies a tentative conclusion is that the valuation disparity is likely to increase with a corresponding increase in the degree of assigned moral responsibility

experiments on the difference between willingness to pay and willingness to accept comment reply willingness to pay wtp and willingness to accept wta measures of welfare change have been found to differ substantially when elicited from surveys or experimental market transactions conventional economic theory suggests that the difference between wtp and wta should be smaller than those observed in empirical tests this study focuses on the hypothesis that the availability of substitutes for the good being evaluated affects the difference between the two measures the results suggest that the existence of a substitute does reduce the difference between wtp and wta however the difference between these two measures is significant with or without substitutes

an investigation of the rationality of consumer valuations of multiple health risks after developing a conceptual analysis of consumer valuation of multiple risks we explore both economic and cognitive hypotheses regarding individual risk taking using a sample of over 1 500 consumers our study ascertains risk dollar tradeoffs for the risks associated with using an insecticide and a toilet bowl cleaner we observe the expected positive valuation of risk reductions and find empirical support for a diminishing in the valuation of risk reduction as the extent of the risk reduction increases we also find evidence of certainty premiums for the total elimination of one risk but no strong evidence of additional certainty premiums for the elimination of multiple risks strong reference risk effects are evident as increases in risk were valued much more greatly than were decreases

researching preferences valuation and hypothetical bias a number of recent papers in environmental economics have focused on the process of researching preferences agents are uncertain about preferences but with effort may narrow their uncertainty this issue has arisen in formulating bids in contingent valuation cv as well as the debate over the divergence between wtp and wta in the context of cv it has been suggested that the hypothetical nature of the preference elicitation process biases responses this paper provides both a theoretical model and experimental evidence to contribute to this debate the model is a model of competitive bidding for a private good with two components that are particularly relevant to the debate the first component is that bidders are unsure of their own value for the private good but may purchase information about their own value researching preferences the second component is that there is a probability that the auction is hypothetical that the winning bidder will not get the private good and will not pay the winning bid the experiment tests this theoretical model of bidding equilibrium and analyzes the effects of variations in the parameters hypotheticalness information costs and number of agents on the endogenous variables such as the proportion of bidders who become informed and the winning bid experimental results suggest that an increase in the hypotheticalness of an auction tends to decrease the likelihood that bidders pay for information on their valuation with an ambiguous effect on the winning bid

consumer rationality and the status quo received microeconomic theory presumes rational consumers maximize utility over all commodity bundles recent analysis however suggests that a consumer s status quo may limit economic rationality bias consumer decisions and induce serious errors in survey based valuations of public and private goods using regression and choice theoretic frameworks we investigate the existence of status quo effects in the consumer valuation of a particular unpriced product the reliability of residential electrical service such valuations have become important in electric utility resource planning and rate making we find substantial status quo effects which must be addressed in welfare comparisons regarding electric service reliability

substitutability experience and the value disparity evidence from the marketplace abstract recent empirical evidence suggests that important disparities exist between willingness to pay and compensation demanded for the same good these results which clearly contradict closely held economic doctrines have led some influential commentators to call for an entirely new economic paradigm to displace conventional neoclassical theory this study examines the generality of these experimental findings by going to a well functioning marketplace and examining more than 350 individual decisions across two incentive compatible elicitation mechanisms the data suggest that behavior of individuals with intense experience approaches neoclassical predictions any observed wta wtp disparity amongst this group is negligible

tests of market outcomes with asymmetric valuations of gains and losses smaller gains fewer trades and less value abstract the pervasive finding that individuals value losses more than gains suggests that actual gains from trade and numbers of market exchanges may well be much smaller than would be the case if people s buying and selling prices were equivalent as normally assumed the results of two sets of costless market simulations using actual gain and loss valuations show that the actual gains from exchange and trade volumes are less than half of those expected with conventional assumptions and that completion of all pareto efficient exchanges fail by wide margins to shift entitlements to those willing to pay the most for them these findings suggest the valuation disparity has significant welfare implications and may be a major cause of market stickiness

biculturalism and attributional complexity cross cultural leadership effectiveness although biculturals represent a growing demographic the nascent literature on biculturals has not addressed their cross cultural leadership capabilities or effectiveness attributional patterns and variations across cultures are crucial and call for higher attributional complexity ac and attributional knowledge to reduce cultural distance this study provides a systematic theoretical connection between biculturals and their higher levels of ac and attributional knowledge which account for their cross cultural competence this connection is then linked to attributional processes drawing from recent literature on attributional models of leadership the proposed theoretical model posits that biculturals have higher levels of ac and attributional knowledge which helps them make more accurate attributions which are also less culturally biased managerial behaviors resulting from these attributions lead to cross cultural leadership effectiveness because they absorb uncertainty on the part of subordinates the proposed model addresses both cognitive and emotional competency elements of cross cultural leadership we contribute to the international business literature by providing a theoretical model for examining factors critical to the cross cultural leadership effectiveness of leaders who have more than one cultural profile managerial implications for selection and training of international executives are discussed in the context of culture specific and culture general capabilities contributions limitations and boundary conditions are also discussed

the trade off between money and travel time a test of the theory of reference dependent preferences we formulate a model of reference dependent preferences based on the marginal rate of substitution at the reference point of a reference free utility function using binary choices on the trade off between money and travel time reference dependence is captured by value functions that are centered at the reference the model predicts a directly testable relationship among four commonly used valuation measures willingness to pay wtp willingness to accept wta equivalent gain eg and equivalent loss el moreover we show that the model allows recovering the underlying reference free value of time based on a large survey data set we estimate an econometric version of the model allowing for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity in a series of tests of high statistical power we find that the relationship among the four valuation measures conforms to our model and that the constraints on the parameters implied by the model are met the gap between wtp and wta is found to be a factor of four loss aversion plays an important role in explaining responses moreover participants are more loss averse in the time dimension than the cost dimension we further find evidence of asymmetrically diminishing sensitivity finally we show that the fraction of mistakes in the sense that participants are observed to sometimes select dominated options varies systematically in a way consistent with the model of reference dependence the results of the paper have important implications for the evaluation of infrastructure investment and pricing reforms in the transport sector

the benefits and costs of riparian analysis habitat preservation a willingness to accept willingness to pay contingent valuation approach abstract the contingent valuation method cvm was used to obtain the willingness to pay wtp of households in the contiguous area of the garonne river near toulouse france and the willingness to accept wta of households that currently own land on the banks of the river to provide a strip of riparian land for habitat preservation results for the wtp study indicated a relatively large difference in wtp between open and closed ended responses when corrected for the substantial number of 0 observations the wtp was reduced by about half the wta results were constrained by relatively few positive responses however the value given by farmers who indicated a positive wta appears consistent with revenues generated from crops moreover many farmers who were already providing habitat preservation indicated a zero minimum wta although the small number of wta responses severely limits the ability to draw definitive conclusions a comparison of the derived benefits wtp and costs wta was made which appeared to suggest the possibility of a favorable a benefit cost ratio

experimental tests of the endowment effect abstract the endowment effect which predicts undertrading and a willingness to accept greater than willingness to pay is studied using responses that remove all reference to buying or selling and focuses only on choice tasks the results significantly lower the willingness to pay willingness to accept discrepancy but the latter is still significant a high efficiency open display uniform price auction is used to exchange mugs for money since mugs are randomly assigned to half of 2n subjects n 2 mugs are predicted to trade less than n 2 mugs trade on average but more than previously reported the phenomenon exists but is less prominent than reported previously

willingness to pay and willingness to accept how much can they differ comment i agree with the point made by edoh y amiran and daniel a hagen 2003 that there can be a substantial or even infinite divergence between the wta and wtp for a public good even where there is a nonzero elasticity of substitution between market goods and the public good provided that the indifference curves are asymptotically bounded with respect to market goods in the manner they describe this is an important point they are also correct to point out that the elasticity of substitution is a local concept whereas their asymptotic boundedness condition applies also for discrete changes my 1991 paper used a local analysis because it was following the structure of the analysis in robert d willig 1976 and alan randall and john r stoll 1980 i wanted to show that while randall and stoll appeared to extend willig s local result on wta versus wtp from price changes to changes in the quantity of a public good the relevant elasticity was in fact different and involved the substitution elasticity as well as the income elasticity i view these points by amiran and hagen as not two separate results but essentially the same result their asymptotic boundedness condition generalizes my zero elasticity of substitution condition to discrete changes the asymptotic boundedness condition can be expressed as follows assuming a bivariate utility function u x q and given a reference point x q associated with a reference utility level u u x q there exists some q q such that for all q q there exists no x such that u x q u in other words no amount of x can substitute for the reduction in public good from q to q q in the case of a zero elasticity of substitution q q but as amiran and hagen show in their theorem 1 this is unnecessarily restrictive when dealing with a discrete reduction in q furthermore their theorem 2 can be viewed as a special case of their theorem 1 in which q 0 which makes q an essential commodity it is well known in consumer theory that the wta to avoid the loss of an essential market good is infinite their theorem 2 extends this result to the case of an essential nonmarket good but as their theorem 1 shows essentialness is not necessary for an infinite wta the boundedness condition is the key and this implies a fundamental lack of substitutability between money market goods and the public good

using hicksian surplus measures to examine consistency of individual preferences evidence from a field experiment this paper pits neoclassical theory against prospect theory by investigating several clean tests of the competing hypotheses consistent with previous work the field experimental data suggest that prospect theory adequately organizes behavior among inexperienced consumers whereas consumers with intense market experience behave largely in accordance with neoclassical predictions the data indicate that the convergence in values occurs entirely because of lower hicksian equivalent surplus values

discount rates inferred from decisions an experimental study two hundred and four students of economics and finance participated in an intertemporal choice experiment which manipulated three dimensions in a 4 4 4 factorial design scenario postponing a receipt postponing a payment expediting a receipt expediting a payment time delay 0 5 1 2 and 4 years and size of cashflow 40 200 1000 and 5000 individual discount rates were inferred from the responses and then used to test competitively four hypotheses regarding the behavior of discount rates the classical hypothesis asserting that the discount rate is uniform across scenarios time delays and sums of cashflow was flatly rejected a market segmentation approach was found lacking the results support an implicit risk hypothesis according to which delayed consequences are associated with an implicit risk value and an added compensation hypothesis which asserts that individuals require compensation for a change in their financial position

willingness to pay and willingness to accept some evidence of an endowment effect the source of the disparity between willingness to pay wtp and willingness to accept wta measures of value has been the subject of recent debate in the literature this paper presents the results of a pilot experiment designed to test whether contrary to the findings of shogren et al 1994 the endowment effect might be a significant source of the wtp wta divergence the results are a direct contradiction of what the substitutability argument would predict and thus indicate that the endowment effect cannot yet be dismissed as a possible driving force behind the disparity

the disparity between willingness to pay and compensation demanded another look at laboratory evidence abstract the existence of a disparity between willingness to pay and compensation demanded is tested in three controlled experiments the results indicate a modest initial disparity which is reduced in a learning environment

examining risk preferences under high monetary incentives experimental evidence from the people s republic of china several experimental sessions were conducted to elicit certainty equivalents for a sequence of lotteries involving real monetary outcomes the opportunity to conduct sessions in the people s republic of china afforded the ability to offer very large monetary incentives relative to subjects living costs in the highest payoff condition subjects earned three times their normal monthly revenue in the course of a two hour experiment results indicate a statistically significant impact of the level of monetary incentives on revealed risk preferences however even under extreme monetary incentives subjects demanded amounts well in excess of expected value for low probability gain prospects copyright 1992 by american economic association

more laboratory evidence on the disparity between willingness to pay and compensation demanded abstract recent experimental work showing a disparity between willingness to pay for and compensation demanded to give up lottery tickets is contrary to economists ideas about rationality presented here are the results of experiments in which subjects participate in second price auctions to indicate willingness to pay and compensation demanded for lottery tickets that have fixed odds of winning or losing money when the auction institution used has truthful revelation of preferences as the dominant strategy and that strategy is announced to subjects the difference between the measures of value decreases significantly the within subject comparison design provides a more discriminating measure of behavior than between subject comparison designs used previously

a new meta analysis on the wtp wta disparity abstract this study reports a new meta analysis of papers that elicit willingness to pay wtp and willingness to accept compensation wta measures of value for the same good we investigate the effects of type of good and several survey design features on the wtp wta disparity measured as the logarithm of the ratio of mean wta to mean wtp confirming horowitz and mcconnell s 2002 pioneering meta analysis we find the disparity is smaller for ordinary private goods than for public and non market goods that it is not solely an artifact of using hypothetical transactions or other weak experimental or survey methods and that it is smaller for studies using student subjects in addition we find that the disparity is smaller when subjects have experience valuing the good in real markets or through repeated experimental trials in contrast to horowitz and mcconnell we find the disparity is significantly smaller in studies using incentive compatible elicitation mechanisms the disparity is smaller in more recent studies an effect that is attributable only in part to changes in study characteristics

values of gains and losses reference states and choice of measure the available empirical evidence continues to suggest that people commonly value losses more and often much more than otherwise commensurate gains consequently current practice of using the wtp measure for all changes is often likely to lead to misleading assessments of welfare changes the reference dependence of preferences implies instead that while the wtp measure is appropriate for gains the value of both positive and negative changes in the domain of losses will usually be more accurately assessed with the wta measure