Having the lawn may be nice, but if everyone has this type of lawn, the resulting eutrophication will degrade the lake and have a negative impact on property values. And there's more pressure for collective action. If everybody is being good and a few people are cheating, you can still mess up the lake. So I think that's been useful for lake groups and communities to take actions to protect their lakes. At the core of Boyle's research is the ability to elicit an accurate and reliable measure of public values from surveys.
People say, well, it's really hard.
We can't put values on some things. But the truth is, people put values on things every day. It took me about 10 years to figure out an appropriate experimental design and to develop the statistics, but I showed that there really was an anchor on the first bid that you gave them, even when you do not ask the follow-up questions. The higher the first bid, the higher you'd end up in the final amount that you would get. Boyle conclusively showed that the resulting experimental bias affected the outcome of such valuation studies.