Contingent Valuation and Revealed Preference Methodologies: Comparing the Estimates for Quasi-Public Goods

Abstract

A literature search provides 83 studies from which 616 comparisons of contingent valuation (CV) to revealed preference (RP) estimates are made. Summary statistics of the CV/RP ratios are provided for the complete dataset, a 5 percent trimmed dataset, and a weighted dataset that gives equal weight to each study rather than each CV/RP comparison. For the complete dataset, the sample mean CV/RP ratio is 0.89 with a 95 percent confidence interval [0.81-0.96] and a median of 0.75. For the trimmed and weighted datasets, these summary statistics are (0.77; [0.74-0.81]; 0.75) and (0.92; [0.81-1.03]; 0.94), respectively. The Spearman rank correlation coefficients between the CV and RP estimates for the three datasets are 0.78, 0.88, and 0.92.