A CONSISTENT METHOD FOR CALIBRATING CONTINGENT VALUE SURVEY DATA

This paper outlines a statistical method for calibrating contingent va lue survey data derived from the assumption that individuals make cons trained utility maximizing decisions. The method proposed allows us to determine the influence of respondent characteristics on bias, as dis tinct from their influence on the preference parameters, A specific fu nctional form for individual preferences was used to derive closed-for m analytical expressions for willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-acc ept that allow systematic deviations in individual responses to be exp licitly modeled by providing a structural interpretation of the error term. Promising results are obtained for both open-ended and dichotomo us choice data using three CV data sets.