Elicitation of Expert Opinion in Benefit Transfer of Environmental Goods

Benefit transfer is a method for estimating the value of environmental goods that involves the use of past information on identical or similar goods. This paper considers the extent to which benefit transfer can be based on prior distributions elicited from expert opinion. We propose two alternative methods to elicit the parameters of a prior distribution from experts on environmental valuation. An experiment is carried out on the value of National Parks in Spain. The results from the elicited distributions are compared with the information provided by onsite samples of visitors. The results indicate that individual experts made different predictions about the potential value of the policy areas that were diverse and unable to accurately predict the value for each policy site. However, the average across the elicited distributions approaches the estimated distribution with empirical data and accurately predicts the relative values for the two policy sites considered.