ABSTRACT
There are many important goods and services in our everyday lives that are not bought and sold. Danger, excessive noise, and polluted air are examples of nonmarketed costs we all live with. Beautiful sunsets, views of snow-capped mountain peaks or historic buildings are examples of goods with non-marketed visual benefits. Because these non-marketed goods are common, benefit-cost analysis would be quite limited in scope if such goods could not be valued in dollar terms. Important policy issues related to all types of pollution, traffic congestion, health policy, and many others could not be analyzed in economically rational terms without some effort to assign defensible dollar values to these goods. The goal of this chapter is to explain how such values may be estimated.
