Abstract:

Stated-preference techniques provide information on public demand for non-market goods and services. Whilst for many political and academic purposes methods that assess preferences on a metric scale as monetary values are common practice, their elicitation has proven difficult and is often of doubtful validity. In many cases, ordinal measures of public preferences might be an alternative, as the required choices tend to be closer to everyday decision-making and thus less demanding for the respondents, yet informative for policymakers. In this article, we examine the performance of four stated-preference techniques, namely ranking, grouping, budget games and contingent valuation, with regard to the reliability and suitability of the results for different applications, and illustrate their use by means of a case study on public demand for environmental services of agriculture in Northeim district, Germany.

KEYWORDS: agri-environmental payment scheme, budget game, grouping, ordinal, ranking