[1] We present an interdisciplinary approach to attach economic value to model certainty. The central theme of this paper concerns valuing certainty in water resource management, specifically resource allocation. A conceptual framework is developed to study (1) a hypothetical scenario of three water users attempting to mutually agree on allocation of some fixed amount of water amongst themselve...

The literature estimating the economic value for water quality changes has grown considerably over the last 30 years, resulting in an expanded pool of information potentially available to support national and regional policy analysis. Using 131 willingness to pay estimates from 18 studies that use a similar definition of water quality, we performed a meta-regression analysis and found mixed res...

Even in historically water-rich areas, population growth and drought put pressure on water supplies. Understanding public attitudes about water management and, especially water conservation, may become increasingly salient as even humid regions attempt to shift to demand side management. Using the contingent valuation method we estimate the willingness to pay for water conservation measures. Ou...

The long-term success of payment for environmental services (PES) schemes depends on adequate demand for services and sustainable financing. We examine the viability of using locally financed payments to protect watershed services in rural eastern Costa Rica. Using dichotomous choice contingent valuation, we measure households’ willingness to pay higher water bills for a local PES programme to ...

The Swedish coastal zone is a scene of conflicting interests about various goods and services provided by nature. Open-access conditions and the public nature of many services increase the difficulty in resolving these conflicts. "Sustainability" is a vague but widely accepted guideline for finding reasonable trade-offs between different interests. The UN view of sustainable development suggest...

Diminishing marginal utility (DMU) is a basic tenet of economic and psychological models of judgment and choice, but its determinants are little understood. In the research reported here, we tested whether insensitivities in valuations of dollar amounts (e.g., $40, $100) may be due to inexact mappings of symbolic numbers (i.e., "40," "100") onto mental magnitudes. In three studies, we demonstra...

Issues around water – its quality, use, availability and environmental value – can be a major point of tension between mineral projects and local communities. Failure to manage these issues appropriately can jeopardise the obtaining of regulatory approvals for new projects and place at risk the ‘social licence to operate’ of existing operations. Conversely, there may also be significant opportu...

This paper explores the idea that a proper valuing of natural environments is essential to (and not just a natural basis for) a broader human virtue that might be called ʻappreciation of the goodʼ. This kind of valuing can explain, without any commitment to a metaphysics of intrinsic values, how and why it is good to value certain natural phenomena for their own sakes. The objection that such a...