A Repeated Sampling Technique in Assessing the Validity of Benefit Transfer in Valuing Non-Market Goods

Disentangling the Pure Time Effect From Site and Preference Heterogeneity Effects in Benefit Transfer: An Empirical Investigation of Transferability

“…Some studies find that benefit function transfer performs better than unit value transfers (Kirchhoff et al 1997;Kaul et al 2013), while others claim the opposite (Barton 2002;Källstrøm et al 2010). Many results support that benefit function transfers perform relatively better for transfers between dissimilar sites, since it captures differences between the study and policy sites, while unit value transfers are as good as or even better suited for transfers between similar sites due to function transfers possibly over-parameterising similar sites (Chattopadhyay 2003;Brouwer and Bateman 2005;Bateman et al 2011). However, there is no clear guideline to categorise sites as similar or dissimilar, and thus it is difficult to obtain a clear picture about the relative performance of BT types depending on site similarity.…”

“…Furthermore, the required level of precision can vary depending on the context that the BT is used. Previously BT has been used in many different contexts, including health (Barton 2002;Rozan 2004;Brouwer and Bateman 2005;Smith et al 2006;Brouwer 2006), ecosystem services (Brouwer and Spaninks 1999;Baskaran et al 2010), water quality (Muthke and Holm-Mueller 2004;Brouwer and Bateman 2005), private goods (Kealy et al 1988), recreational areas (Loomis 1992;Downing and Ozuna 1996;Kirchhoff et al 1997;Teisl et al 1995) and amenities associated with house prices (Chattopadhyay 2003;Eshet et al 2007). …”

Exploring Benefit Transfer: Disamenities of Waste Transfer Stations

“…The validity tests are based on the general premise that an effective transfer largely depends on the degree of similarity between the study sites and the policy site with respect to factors including geographic location, type and level of amenity, and the cultural and socioeconomic profile of the population. Similarity is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition, however (Chattopadhyay 2003). A simple way (but not economically recommended) to test the reliability of BT could be by predicting WTP based on primary studies, before an actual project is implemented and then revisiting the area when the project is completed to observe whether people behave according to their expected WTP.…”

“…To our knowledge, our study is the first to examine BT performance on a pre-designed HPM study in the context of waste management. In the following, a short review of such HPM studies; note that only the first two studies are associated with waste management context and only Chattopadhyay (2003) was originally designed for BT exercises. Brisson and Pearce (1995) estimated disamenities costs associated with incinerators and landfills in the UK.…”

“…The authors did not find theoretical justification for using the BT method in their study, thus they investigated each landfill site independently. Chattopadhyay (2003) applied HPM to amenity improvements, including air pollution, to examine the performance of BT methods in a statistically controlled, repeated sampling scheme, using a Chicago housing sample. In contrast to Atkinson and Crocker (1992), the author argued that even under perfect statistical conditions, the quality of transferred estimates was poor for both the BFT and UVT, with a slight advantage to the BFT (average TER was 30%).…”