In this paper, the issue of whether willingness to pay (WTP) for the benefits generated by a public good should be elicited on an individual or a household basis is addressed. Differences between individual and household WTP may arise when members of the household are mutually altruistic. It is shown that, for general specifications of altruism, household WTP is less than the sum of household m...

Companies today have to adopt strategies that embrace both a closer reaction to the customers’ needs and efficiency. Mass customisation meets this challenge by offering individually customised goods and services with mass production efficiency. According to a number of recent surveys, there is evidence for the increasing importance of this strategy in various industries. But what do the custome...

To elicit an affected population’s preferences for, e.g., better health or environment stated preference (SP) methods are often used. SP methods are based on hypothetical market settings which necessitates validity tests of the results. This study describes a validity test on the basis of theoretical predictions and empirical findings for private and public safety measures. According to the tes...

Improving biological sustainability through health and wellness improvements in the built environment is currently being applied to high-end real estate development in both the residential and commercial environment in the United States. However, the market for health and wellness extends well beyond the top income bracket. This study adopts a choice experiment (CE) approach to investigate indi...

The expansion of higher education raises the risk environment for school-leavers as more occupations become partially graduate with the result that occupational signals are fuzzy. This makes the educational decision more difficult and more risky, especially with more of the cost of higher education being transferred to the individual. After a discussion of the nature of risk, derived from Beck,...

Do people from different countries and different backgrounds have similar preferences for how much more the rich should earn than the poor? Using survey data from 40 countries (N = 55,238), we compare respondents' estimates of the wages of people in different occupations-chief executive officers, cabinet ministers, and unskilled workers-to their ideals for what those wages should be. We show th...

On the basis of a low probability insurance experiment with substantial money on the line, we demonstrate that concern is an important driver of willingness to pay (WTP) for insurance when there is ambiguity surrounding the estimate. Concern still plays an important role when probabilities are given precisely. This finding explains why some individuals pay too much and others little for insuran...

editorial editorial l ong ago, in a political galaxy far away, i was educated at one of the world's elite universities. neither i, nor my middle-class parents, paid a penny in upfront fees for this privilege. in fact, the state—or more precisely my local municipality—paid me a substantial 'maintenance grant' every term which covered my room in college, living expenses, books and other study ess...