Cost–Benefit Analysis and Distributional Preferences

Helen Scarborough, Senior Lecturer, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Deakin University, Warrnambool, Australia and Jeff Bennett, Professor of Environmental Management, Crawford School of Economics and Government, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

’Helen Scarborough and Jeff Bennett have produced a work that is genuinely path-breaking. As is often the case with path-breaking work, the idea is simple enough: if people can respond to choice experiments in ways that tell us a lot about what they value and how much they value it, why would they not be able to respond to choice experiments where the options offered have different distributional consequences? Such simple ideas evade implementation not because they are so hard to think up, but because it is so easy to dismiss them as unthinkable. All credit goes to Scarborough and Bennett for busting through this particular unthinkability barrier. . . [The authors] may be surprised by the magnitude and the nature of the impact this work eventually enjoys’- From the foreword by Alan Randall, The University of Sydney, Australia and The Ohio State University, US

• Contents: Foreword 1. Distribution and Environmental Policy 2. Distributional Weighting and Cost–Benefit Analysis 3. Choice Modelling and Distributional Preferences 4. Case Study: Design of Intergenerational Distribution Choice Experiment 5. Case Study: Results of Intergenerational Distribution Choice Experiment 6. Choice Modelling and Distributional Preferences: Challenges and Opportunities Bibliography Index