Eliciting the Public's Budgetary Preferences: Insights from Contingent Valuation

Contingent valuation studies can provide useful insights for designers and users of surveys eliciting the public's comprehensive budgetary preferences. Such studies attempt to elicit the public's monetary valuations of specific nontraded goods to support decisions of managers in the public sector. Although controversial, these surveys provide much useful methodological analysis and evidence relevant to avoiding bias and unreliability of surveys intended to elicit more general budgetary preferences. Significantly refined over the past several decades, the underlying methodology shows substantial promise for further development. Collaboration of specialists knowledgeable about public budgeting and finance with specialists in economics, survey methods, and market research could contribute greatly to designing, implementing, and evaluating surveys of the citizenry's public budgetary preferences.