ABSTRACT
Damages to a natural resource can be defined as the sum of losses in use and nonuse values resulting from injury to the quantity or quality of service flows of the natural resource. The direct method of assessing damages–asking beneficiaries of a natural resource to indicate the values they place on hypothetical changes in service flows—has a number of distinct advantages. The first advantage is that indirect methods (such as the property value approach) can only measure use values, while the direct approach in the form of the contingent valuation (CV) method can measure both use values and nonuse values. However, this is not so for the alternative version of the direct method—the contingent behavior (CB) method. The CB method asks survey respondents for hypothetical adjustments in behavior in response to changes in the service flows of a natural resource and therefore suffers the same limitation as indirect methods in this regard.
