ABSTRACT
Part II of this book entitled “Common property and public goods,” contains five chapters that employ experimental methods to study the effects of alternative incentives with respect to public goods and common pool resources on the behavior of subjects. How useful are the findings from these chapters to advancing the field of environmental economics? It is my task to take a stab at this question and to opine, more generally, on ways in which experimental studies could be adapted to be more useful. As an environmental economist with a strong interest in non-market valuation, I find a fun paradox to this question as it appears to me that some of the earliest work in experimental economics was done by environmental economists and that this early body of work identified some key issues that helped spawn the behavioral economics literature. After all, what were the early contingent valuation studies (a method that was firmly established as an important tool by the mid 1970s) but experimental studies in the field? The WTP/WTA divergence was first observed in these studies (for example Brown and Hammack 1973); further, as early as 1979, Bishop and Heberlein were experimenting with real money payments and numerous environmental economists were studying interviewer effects, sequencing, alternative payment vehicles, and the effects of many other institutional features of markets and the environmental goods being valued.
