National and International Benefit Transfer Testing with a Rigorous Test Procedure

Benefit transfer, as a mean to transfer values from existing monetary valuation studies to new policy sites, has been in use for many years. This paper aims to analyze the forecasting quality of benefit transfer by applying a rigoroust-test – also referred to as Accuracy-t-test – that takes into account testing errors which were made in previous surveys. Beside the analysis of national benefit transfers based on two German contingent valuation studies additional efforts were made to investigate into the validity and accuracy of international benefit transfer by considering two Norwegian studies that employed a similar survey design. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004benefit transfer, contingent valuation method, water quality,

Validity Tests of Benefit Transfer – Are We Performing the Wrong Tests?

The validity of environmental benefit transfer has been tested on numerous occasions assuming classical null hypothesis of equality. We argue against this assumption on the basis of theory, which clearly indicates that environmental benefits should be assumed to vary from context to context. We suggest the use of equivalence testing as a more appropriate and a clear compliment to the shortcomings of classical tests. Equivalence tests test the null hypothesis of difference between the original and transferred value estimates. Equivalence tests also combine the concepts of statistical significance and policy significance into one test, by defining an acceptable transfer error prior to the validity test. The results of a published study on validity of benefit transfer are reversed when subjected to an equivalence test. Copyright Springer 2005benefit transfer, contingent valuation, equivalence tests, validity,