Issues in improvement of the valuation of non-market goods

Environmental goods including services of natural resources and health are examples of goods not priced by trade in markets, for which it is widely agreed that monetary valuations are needed to throw light on their worth relative to market goods. Econometric and other approaches deducing values through revealed behavior constitute one way to estimate true values. Interview techniques are another. Some take strong views in favor of one of the two ways. Others take the eclectic view that both ways have something to offer and are needed in view of the difficulty at best of deducing non-market values. Most of this special volume is concerned with interview techniques, offered in the belief that this general approach is robust and susceptible to improvements that the articles explore. The articles grew in part out of the Conference on Valuing Non-Market Goods held at the University of Chicago in the Summer of 1995.