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Broadening the Concept and Measurement of Existence Value

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2017

John Loomis
John Loomis*
Affiliation:
Division of Environmental Studies, Department of Agricultural Economics, University of California, Davis
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Abstract

Recent efforts to refine the concept of existence value and to empirically measure it has led to an unnecessary narrowing of the concept of existence value. This paper uses the literature on public goods to argue that existence value is a much broader concept than proposed by several authors. Two commonly used but different empirical approaches to measuring existence values are compared and shown to lead to statistically different decompositions of total value between use and existence categories.

Type
Articles
Information
Northeastern Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , April 1988 , pp. 23 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Michael Welsh in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University for sharing his work on this subject with me and for his comments on an earlier version of this paper. However, sole responsibility for what follows rests with the author and the author alone. This research was supported by funds from the Agricultural Experiment Station, Regional Project W-133.

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