ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the theoretical economics of various forms of unrevealed values. It explores existence value and discusses other forms of unrevealed values: options for future consumption, public goods, unpredictable events, values obscured by ambiguous information and altruistic values. Existence is an indivisible, nonexclusive attribute of a good, conceptually separable from but jointly produced by some "uses" of the good. Public values are determined more by uniqueness from the consumer's perspective than by biophysical uniqueness, even though the former is sometimes overlooked. The existence value for a population may be divided by the number of units in the population to calculate average existence value. Option value is the value of an option that keeps available the possible future use of a resource, apart from the value of using the resource. Such values are obviously important and are unrevealed or only partly revealed by normal market mechanisms.
