Working Papers

The WNE Working Papers series has been published by the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw since 2008.

The WNE Working Papers series provides a fast, open channel for disseminating research conducted at the Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw. The papers hosted here are working versions (pre-prints) and may evolve as authors refine their analyses, incorporate feedback, or progress through formal peer-review. What you read is the current version released by the authors, timestamped and assigned DOI/ISSN identifiers to ensure precise citation and version tracking. Copyright remains with the authors, who may, at any time, upload a revised file or add a note directing readers to a later, peer-reviewed publication.

The Working Papers series accepts articles by research employees of the Faculty and publications from conferences organised at the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw. Articles should be original research papers which have not been previously published, on the subject of economics.

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Number of Results 20

WP(27/2026)521. What Happens Without Conservation? The Prospect of Heritage Loss in Contingent Valuation

Authors: Jusypenko Bartosz
Economic valuation of heritage conservation depends on what respondents expect to happen without the implementation of a proposed intervention, yet this no-program counterfactual is often left implicit. We examine whether explicitly directing respond…

WP521. What Happens Without Conservation? The Prospect of Heritage Loss in Contingent Valuation

Economic valuation of heritage conservation depends on what respondents expect to happen without the implementation of a proposed intervention, yet this no-program counterfactual is often left implicit. We examine whether explicitly directing respondents to consider potential heritage loss affects stated willingness to pay (WTP) for renovation of a building and whether the contribution of information about adaptive reuse depends on whether such loss enters the valuation decision. A contingent valuation survey of 452 adult residents living near Pückler Palace, a deteriorating historic building in Poland, used a 2 × 2 randomized design combining a loss-consideration prompt with information about a genuine proposal to adapt the renovated palace as the new premises of the Museum of Ceramics. WTP was elicited as the maximum mandatory one-off levy respondents would support within an advisory-referendum framework. Among respondents not assigned to the loss-prompt treatment, a post-valuation question identified spontaneous consideration of heritage loss. Two-part models separated the probability of positive WTP from the amount stated among positive responses. Randomized treatment estimates indicated higher WTP under the loss prompt when reuse information was absent. The unconditional mean difference was positive but imprecisely estimated, while the corresponding difference among positive-WTP respondents was statistically significant. In the conditional models, respondents assigned to the loss prompt had approximately twice the odds of positive WTP and a 61% higher conditional geometric mean of positive WTP than that of unprompted respondents who did not report spontaneous loss consideration. Among unprompted respondents, spontaneous loss consideration—reported by 54%—was associated with a 92% higher conditional geometric mean of positive WTP than in unprompted respondents who did not report such consideration. Evidence that reuse information contributed more when loss was not considered was suggestive rather than conclusive. The findings show that common information about an asset’s current condition need not produce a common understanding of its expected future without the proposed intervention. Stated preference surveys should therefore specify this trajectory with sufficient clarity and credibility that respondents are evaluating a common underlying policy change.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.27.521
Jusypenko Bartosz
cultural heritage historic preservation adaptive reuse contingent valuation stated preferences prospect of loss

WP(4/2026)498. Behavioral Biases in Stated Preference Valuation of Mortality Risk Reductions: Cost Vector, Anchoring, and Scope Effects

Authors: Zawadzki Wojciech, Andersson Henrik, Czajkowski Mikołaj, Hole Arne Risa
This study investigates how behavioral biases influence stated preference valuation of mortality risk reductions, commonly summarized as the value of a statistical life (VSL). Using a discrete choice experiment (DCE) combined with a contingent valuat…

WP498. Behavioral Biases in Stated Preference Valuation of Mortality Risk Reductions: Cost Vector, Anchoring, and Scope Effects

This study investigates how behavioral biases influence stated preference valuation of mortality risk reductions, commonly summarized as the value of a statistical life (VSL). Using a discrete choice experiment (DCE) combined with a contingent valuation double-bounded dichotomous choice and an open-ended follow-up, we elicit individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for cardiovascular mortality risk reductions. In a randomized design, we varied the cost attribute across three cost range treatments and manipulated information disclosure and feedback to examine three behavioral phenomena: cost vector effects (whether the range of costs presented affects WTP), scope insensitivity (whether WTP scales appropriately with the magnitude of the risk reduction), and anchoring (whether initial cost cues affect subsequent responses). Our results show that mean VSL estimates can vary by up to ~25% between cost treatments. Furthermore, WTP responses exhibit partial scope insensitivity – larger risk reductions do not proportionally increase WTP – indicating a deviation from theoretical expectations. Importantly, we find no strong evidence of anchoring: neither revealing all attribute levels upfront, nor starting with extreme cost levels, nor providing feedback on quiz questions significantly affected respondents’ choices or WTP. Our findings underscore the need for careful survey design. Even if VSL distributions remain statistically similar across cost frames, substantial shifts in mean magnitudes could be consequential for policy. We call for standardized guidelines on cost attribute selection and survey protocols to mitigate bias, ensuring that stated preference methods yield reliable welfare estimates for health policy decisions.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.4.498
Zawadzki Wojciech, Andersson Henrik, Czajkowski Mikołaj, Hole Arne Risa
value of statistical life (VSL) stated preference (SP) contingent valuation (CV) behavioral biases anchoring effect scope insensitivity discrete choice experiment (DCE) willingness to pay (WTP) mortality risk reduction cardiovascular diseases

WP(19/2023)426. Reliability of international benefit transfer in cultural economics: Non-market valuation of theater in Denmark and Poland

Authors: Wiśniewska Aleksandra, Zawojska Ewa, Baldin Andrea, Bille Trine
Cultural goods provide numerous non-market benefits to society. Estimates of the benefits are needed for benefit-cost analyses, helping to inform cultural policy decisions and aiming at the efficient allocation of public funds. The non-market benefit…

WP426. Reliability of international benefit transfer in cultural economics: Non-market valuation of theater in Denmark and Poland

Cultural goods provide numerous non-market benefits to society. Estimates of the benefits are needed for benefit-cost analyses, helping to inform cultural policy decisions and aiming at the efficient allocation of public funds. The non-market benefits cannot be assessed through market transactions. While original non-market valuation studies require substantial budgets and time, a benefit transfer approach offers an alternative. It enables the application of empirical estimates from existing original studies conducted at one site to approximate the value at another site. This study provides the first international benefit transfer for performing arts and examines the reliability of various benefit transfer approaches. We use empirical data from two separate stated preference valuation surveys conducted in Denmark and in Poland. Our results suggest that the benefit function transfer accounting for differences in purchasing power parity between the countries can generate transfer errors as low as 3-6%, indicating high reliability of the transferred values.


Wiśniewska Aleksandra, Zawojska Ewa, Baldin Andrea, Bille Trine
international benefit transfer performing arts contingent valuation discrete choice experiment transfer errors

WP(19/2022)395. Estimating environmental damages of a tailings dam failure: The case of the Fundão Dam in Brazil

Authors: Czajkowski Mikołaj, Meade Norman, Seroa da Motta Ronaldo, Ortiz Ramon Arigoni, Welsh Mike, Blanc Gleiciane Carvalho
We present the results of a contingent valuation study aimed at estimating the monetary value of environmental and cultural/heritage injuries caused by the Fundão (tailings) Dam failure in Brazil in 2015 as perceived by the Brazilian populatio…

WP395. Estimating environmental damages of a tailings dam failure: The case of the Fundão Dam in Brazil

We present the results of a contingent valuation study aimed at estimating the monetary value of environmental and cultural/heritage injuries caused by the Fundão (tailings) Dam failure in Brazil in 2015 as perceived by the Brazilian population. While the valuation literature considering mining-related externalities is considerable, valuation studies of injuries resulting from mining incidents are scarce and most available damage assessments apply market valuation methods while rarely considering environmental and other nonmarket-valued impacts. The flooding and the release of tailings from the dam failure led to injuries to  sediments, watercourse opacity, and oxygenation, changes in riparian morphology, loss of human life, mortality to fish and wildlife, changes in the food chain and more along the 675 km watercourse of the Doce River. This was arguably the greatest environmental and cultural/heritage  injury ever caused by a single tailings dam collapse. The study followed state-of-the-art recommendations for the development, administration, and data analysis of stated-preference valuation methods. The survey of a representative sample of 5,195 Brazilian urban households revealed that the average lower-bound willingness-to-pay estimate to avoid a similar incident in the near future was 137 USD and the parametric-based estimate was 230 USD per household, which aggregates to 7.96 or 12.91 billion USD, respectively. This corresponds to environmental damages of 176 or 295 USD per m3 of tailings released.


Czajkowski Mikołaj, Meade Norman, Seroa da Motta Ronaldo, Ortiz Ramon Arigoni, Welsh Mike, Blanc Gleiciane Carvalho
tailings dam failure nonmarket environmental damages contingent valuation willingness to pay

WP(8/2022)384. On the inference about willingness to pay distribution using contingent valuation data

Authors: Czajkowski Mikołaj, Zawojska Ewa, Meade Norman, Seroa da Motta Ronaldo, Welsh Mike, Arigoni Ortiz Ramon
Although contingent valuation (CV) is one of the main sources of estimates of non-market values of environmental goods, little guidance exists regarding parametric approaches for modelling CV data, which would reliably estimate willingness-to-pay (WT…

WP384. On the inference about willingness to pay distribution using contingent valuation data

Although contingent valuation (CV) is one of the main sources of estimates of non-market values of environmental goods, little guidance exists regarding parametric approaches for modelling CV data, which would reliably estimate willingness-to-pay (WTP) values based on binary choice, payment card or open-ended preference elicitation data, among others. CV studies often rely on relatively simple approaches to modeling stated preference responses, without examining alternative modelling specifications. Lower-bound, non-parametric estimates seem to be preferred in legal cases, while studies that apply parametric approaches often select a specification among a limited set of commonly used distributions. To enhance the reliability of CV-based WTP estimates, we propose to adopt a more flexible approach to parametric modelling of a WTP distribution, by considering a wide range of parametric model specifications. We demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach using databases from two large CV studies: the eutrophication reduction valuation for the Baltic Sea Action Plan and the Deepwater Horizon natural resource damage assessment. We find non-negligible differences in WTP value estimates across models with different assumed parametric distributions, and we observe the variation in the values to decrease when only better-fitting models are considered. This emphasizes the need for cautiously identifying the model best fitting to the data, instead of choosing a specification ad hoc without taking into account alternative parametric distributions. Focusing on the best-fitting parametric specifications, we provide alternative WTP value estimates for the two empirical cases studied.


Czajkowski Mikołaj, Zawojska Ewa, Meade Norman, Seroa da Motta Ronaldo, Welsh Mike, Arigoni Ortiz Ramon
contingent valuation parametric modelling stated preferences willingness to pay welfare estimates

WP(4/2022)380. Incentivizing stated preference elicitation with choice-matching in the field

Authors: Zawojska Ewa, Krawczyk Michał
Stated preferences should ideally be elicited in ways providing respondents with economic incentives to report them truthfully—that is, in incentive-compatible conditions. This study aims at testing empirically a novel theoretical approach, whi…

WP380. Incentivizing stated preference elicitation with choice-matching in the field

Stated preferences should ideally be elicited in ways providing respondents with economic incentives to report them truthfully—that is, in incentive-compatible conditions. This study aims at testing empirically a novel theoretical approach, which allows for incentive-compatible elicitation of preferences. Choice-matching, proposed by Cvitanić et al. (2019), is applied here to elicit stated preferences towards a public good. While the approach has been originally designed for incentivizing responses to a multiple choice question, we illustrate its possible application to an open-ended question. We conduct an online experiment mirroring a standard stated preference survey as used for valuation of public goods. Two versions of the survey questionnaire are implemented: one employing the incentive-compatible choice-matching approach and another representing a common non-incentivized setting. We find that the open-ended willingness-to-pay values are statistically significantly higher when stated under choice-matching than when expressed in the non-incentivized conditions.


Zawojska Ewa, Krawczyk Michał
contingent valuation choice-matching incentive compatibility open-ended elicitation stated preferences

WP(6/2020)312. Payment and policy consequentiality in dichotomous choice contingent valuation: Experimental design effects on self-reported perceptions

Authors: Börger Tobias, Abate Tenaw G., Aanesen Margrethe, Zawojska Ewa
Although the contingent valuation literature emphasises the importance of controlling for respondents' consequentiality perceptions, this literature has rarely accounted for the difference between payment and policy consequentiality. We examine t…

WP312. Payment and policy consequentiality in dichotomous choice contingent valuation: Experimental design effects on self-reported perceptions

Although the contingent valuation literature emphasises the importance of controlling for respondents' consequentiality perceptions, this literature has rarely accounted for the difference between payment and policy consequentiality. We examine the influence of the randomly assigned tax amount on consequentiality self-reports and their potential endogeneity using data from a single dichotomous choice survey about reducing marine plastic pollution in Norway. Results show that consequentiality perceptions are a function of the tax amount, with payment consequentiality decreasing and policy consequentiality increasing with higher tax amounts. We discuss the challenge of finding valid instruments to address potential endogeneity of consequentiality perceptions.


Börger Tobias, Abate Tenaw G., Aanesen Margrethe, Zawojska Ewa
Contingent valuation single dichotomous choice payment consequentiality policy consequentiality endogeneity marine plastic pollution

WP(14/2018)273. Moving beyond the contingent valuation versus choice experiment debate – Presentation effects in stated preference

Authors: Lloyd-Smith Patrick, Zawojska Ewa, Adamowicz Wiktor L.
We reexamine the literature comparing "contingent valuation" ("CV") and "choice experiments" ("CEs") in terms of stated preference design features, and empirically investigate an understudied dimension in these…

WP273. Moving beyond the contingent valuation versus choice experiment debate – Presentation effects in stated preference

We reexamine the literature comparing "contingent valuation" ("CV") and "choice experiments" ("CEs") in terms of stated preference design features, and empirically investigate an understudied dimension in these comparisons, namely presentation effects. Structured analysis of the literature suggests that the comparisons of "CV" and "CEs" as broad descriptive terms may mask the many design and methodological differences seen in implementations of the approaches. In the empirical component, we find preference disclosure to be unaffected by text and table presentation formats in elicitation tasks, except when only the first task is considered. Implications of our findings for stated preference research are discussed.


DOI: http://doi.org.10.26405/WP/WNE/2018/273/014
Lloyd-Smith Patrick, Zawojska Ewa, Adamowicz Wiktor L.
stated preference contingent valuation choice experiment presentation effects induced-value experiment

WP(4/2018)263. A New Baseline Model for Estimating Willingness to Pay from Discrete Choice Models

Authors: Carson Richard T., Czajkowski Mikołaj
We show a substantive problem exists with the widely-used ratio of coefficients approach to calculating willingness to pay (WTP) from choice models. The correctly calculated standard error for WTP using this approach is shown to always be infinity. A…

WP263. A New Baseline Model for Estimating Willingness to Pay from Discrete Choice Models

We show a substantive problem exists with the widely-used ratio of coefficients approach to calculating willingness to pay (WTP) from choice models. The correctly calculated standard error for WTP using this approach is shown to always be infinity. A variant of this problem has long been recognized for mixed logit models. We show it occurs even in simple models like the conditional logit used as a baseline reference specification. It occurs because the standard error for the cost parameter implies some possibility that the true parameter value is arbitrarily close to zero. We propose a simple yet elegant way to overcome this problem by reparameterizing the coefficient of the (negative) cost variable to enforce the theoretically correct (and empirically almost always found) positive coefficient using an exponential transformation of the original parameter. This reparameterization enforces the desired restriction that no-part of the confidence region for original cost parameter spans zero. With it the confidence interval for WTP is now finite and well behaved. Our proposed model is straightforward to implement using readily available software. Its log-likelihood value is the same as the usual baseline discrete choice model and we recommend its use as the new standard baseline reference model.


DOI: http://doi.org.10.26405/WP/WNE/2018/263/004
Carson Richard T., Czajkowski Mikołaj
conditional logit confidence intervals contingent valuation delta method discrete choice experiment Krinsky-Robb multinomial logit probit welfare measures

WP(34/2016)225. On a way to overcome strategic overbidding in open-ended stated preference surveys: A recoding approach

Authors: Mahieu Pierre-Alexandre, Crastes Romain, Louviere Jordan, Zawojska Ewa
Stated preference (SP) surveys often use open-ended questions to elicit individuals' willingness-to-pay values for goods, services, or policy projects. However, an open-ended format may encourage strategic overbidding, and so lead to biased value…

WP225. On a way to overcome strategic overbidding in open-ended stated preference surveys: A recoding approach

Stated preference (SP) surveys often use open-ended questions to elicit individuals' willingness-to-pay values for goods, services, or policy projects. However, an open-ended format may encourage strategic overbidding, and so lead to biased value estimates. We propose a new approach, based on economic theory, to limit strategic overbidding in open-ended SP surveys: prior to the valuation question, respondents are told that their insincere responses will be (unfavourably) recoded as zeros. We develop a theoretical model and verify its predictions in a field SP study. We find that the approach works: respondents aware of subsequent unfavourable recoding of their insincere answers state significantly lower willingness-to-pay values.


Mahieu Pierre-Alexandre, Crastes Romain, Louviere Jordan, Zawojska Ewa
stated preferences contingent valuation open-ended survey strategic overbidding recoding approach
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