Willingness-to-Pay Estimates and Their Relevance to Agribusiness Decision Making

Abstract

Although methods such as contingent valuation have received a great deal of attention in environmental valuation literature, fewer studies have reported willingness-to-pay estimates with agribusiness applications. Because agribusinesses are increasingly interested in producing and selling differentiated goods and services whose values has not been established by well-functioning markets, we provide a short introduction to willingness-to-pay methodology and provide a discussion of several different methods used to estimate willingness-to-pay. More specifically, we discuss how much of the work in environmental and experimental valuation literature can be extended to agribusiness applications, which have their own set of unique issues.