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Recent environmental regulations raise the importance of accurate, survey-based methods to estimate environmental values, while interviewing costs stimulate research to improve dichotomous choice survey methods. This paper proposes using strength-of-preference indicators along with dichotomous contingent response data. We model strength-of-preference indicators as quasi-cardinal measures using an ordered-response model. We find that strength-of-preference indicators provide substantial efficiency gains while increasing respondents' effort minimally, with evidence that interpersonal comparison of preference ratings induces no bias. The ordered response model of utility and willingness to pay is superior, even in predicting the binary choice results.

This study reports on a contingent choice survey in which respondents expressed their preferences for packages of watershed management outcomes, where these packages were assessed against alternative institutional characteristics of the funding mechanism. Specifically, this study addresses the issue of respondents' faith in the payment mechanism as an efficient and guaranteed funding source. Analyses of marginal willingness to pay for single variable changes, marginal rates of substitution among variable pairs, and willingness to pay for watershed management packages indicate the potential for significant impacts of payment mechanism attributes. Implications address ranking of policy packages and validity in estimating money-scaled welfare impacts.

In many studies of nonmarket resources, economists have data to disaggregate results according to subpopulations within the full study population. Disaggregated results can increase the usefulness of economic analyses, improve public confidence in the results, and permit public officials to assess equity concerns. We outline an approach to obtain disaggregated results when characteristics of individuals may identify distinct preferences. The approach is applied to public preferences regarding landfill siting decisions. The discussion explores the implications of disaggregated results for policy decisions, for bias in aggregate willingness-to-pay estimates, and for nonmarket research methodologies.

Since 1980, incremental state and national policy decisions concerning public higher education have had a variety of effects on students and institutions. Although there has been very little research, most of these effects appear to be detrimental to the health of the system of public higher education and to the nation's stock of human capital. A thorough economic analysis of the effects of policy changes on public higher education is needed to guide the system into the 21st century.

This paper develops a model that provides an objective framework for evaluating the concerns often cited by members of nearby communities and other state residents when potential sites for solid waste landfills are evaluated. An empirical version of the model is estimated using preference data collected in a paired comparison survey of Rhode Island residents, in which participants identify a preferred site and location for a landfill among two alternatives. The estimated model is used to assign scores to each characteristic describing the natural resources present at a site and the characteristics of the nearby community. The model estimates the proportion of voters who would choose each candidate site in a referendum that includes the complete set of alternatives. This simulated voting mechanism can be used to reduce a long list of technically desirable sites to a shorter list of sites that rank highly according to public preferences regarding natural resources and local community impacts.

This paper describes an approach to facility siting that ranks potential sites in terms of their social impacts. A contingent choice survey based on paired comparisons is used to construct a utility index to rank sites consistent with predicting results of a hypothetical referendum based on the attributes of the sites. The method is likely to be acceptable to public decision makers, since it is analogous to site scoring methods that have been commonly used. Indeed, our approach is currently being employed as part of a larger landfill site selection process in the state of Rhode Island.

In summary, the transformation to the Smart Grid will bring many changes for many stakeholders. Customers will see higher reliability and more opportunity to control their energy usage and cost. Utility employees will have new systems to learn, new responsibilities, and much more information about system operation than they have ever had. The public at large should see environmental benefits as a Smart Grid helps reduce emissions from generating plants by helping control demand and energy usage while still assuring the customers' needs for energy are met.

The role of solitary alkali bees (Nomia melanderi) in the production of alfalfa (Medicago saliva L.) seed in a central California water district is examined empirically. The yield and acreage of alfalfa seed increased rapidly in the district when alkali bees were adopted by a set of innovative farmers during the 1960s. By 1969, farmers in the district had installed more than 100 000 sq ft of artificial bee beds. The alkali bees were destroyed unexpectedly in the early 1970s, leading to a rapid decline in alfalfa seed acres and yields. An estimated production function describes the marginal productivity of the alkali bees and the impact of alkali bees on the marginal productivity of land (...)

Despite the many important uses (and potential abuses) of focus groups in survey design, the CV literature presents few guidelines to aid moderators in their interaction with focus group participants. This paper draws on the theory and practice of ethnographic interviewing to introduce general guidelines that can improve focus groups as an aid to CV research. The proposed guidelines illustrate types of questions that should reduce speculation and moderator-introduced bias in focus group responses, and improve the correspondence between focus group responses and actual behavior. The paper illustrates these ethnographic guidelines through a CV application concerning watershed resources.

A model analyzing household substitution of fuelwood for other heating fuels is needed to clarify the relationship between energy prices and patterns of forest resource utilization. This paper employs the household production methodology to model fuelwood demand in Rhode Island. Data from a cross-sectional survey of 515 households are employed to test a discrete-choice model of household participation in wood-burning and a four-equation system modeling household production of heat and aesthetic benefits from fuelwood and stove capital. Control of selection bias via inclusion of an appropriate instrument allows analysis of aggregate demands. Some broad policy prescriptions applicable to the Northeast generally are presented.

This study constructs a simulation model to evaluate the potential for conflict among residential and agricultural users of water in southern Rhode Island. The model estimates the profitability of irrigation of turf farms and projects the total use and the economic value of irrigation water. The results indicate that the economic value of irrigation water compares favorably with current residential water prices in the area. In addition, substantial demand for irrigation water is projected. Given current rates of growth in turf acreage and residential water use, there appears to be a significant potential for conflict, particularly given the absence of well developed institutions for allocating water among users.

In any society a loss of confidence in the capacity of contemporary institutions and leadership to deal with current problems creates anxieties and feelings of loss of control. A classical reaction to such stress is efforts to return to earlier, presumably simpler, institutional forms and lifestyles, thereby regaining control and the lost sense of purpose and direction. Today in the Northeast, as in much of the nation, many people are alarmed by the recent disturbances and shocks to the American way of life: the energy shortage, the threat of nuclear disaster, high unemployment and prices, faltering state and local finances, and a recurring credibility gap at all levels of government. The perceived inability of institutional forms to deal with these concerns has fostered a re-examination of individual, local and regional goals and a rediscovery of more traditional values based on self-reliance. One manifestation of this phenomenon is the promotion in the region by some professionals and laymen alike of a policy of self-sufficiency in agricultural production.

Data from a sample of Rhode Island households indicate that firewood use along with wood stove use is increasing in response to increases in conventional heating fuel costs. More than half the sample of households reported the intention to reduce their heating fuel costs as their primary reason for burning wood. For nearly 20 percent of the households, the 1977–78 study season was the first heating season that these households had burned firewood. Among wood stove users, 50 percent began using a wood stove for the first season, the 1977–78 study season. Regression results indicate that the variables price, income and primary reason firewood is burned are important in the household's decision on the quantity of firewood burned.