Economic preferences or attitude expressions? An analysis of dollar responses to public issues

Participants in contingent valuation surveys and jurors setting punitive da mages in civil trials provide answers denominated in dollars. These answers are better understood as expressions of attitudes than as indications of e conomic preferences. Well-established characteristics of attitudes and of t he core process of affective valuation explain several robust features of d ollar responses: high correlations with other measures of attractiveness or aversiveness, insensitivity to scope, preference reversals, and the high v ariability of dollar responses relative to other measures of the same attit ude.