Dan Petrolia in an AJAE review of the International Handbook on Nonmarket Environmental Valuation:
The title of this volume gives the impression that it comes in the spirit of, and perhaps extends the work of, previous similarly-titled works, including The Handbook of Contingent Valuation (Alberini and Kahn 2006) and The Handbook of Environmental Economics: Valuing Environmental Changes (Mäler and Vincent 2005). This is misleading. It is certainly not a handbook; it is simply an edited collection of related papers. That said, it is worth reading. As Klaiber and Smith write in their chapter: “We take as given that anyone looking at this volume likes to learn…. Nonetheless, we all realize in reading technical material that there is too much to master and too little time to do it. So a couple of examples might help to convince readers it is worth the effort to learn…” (p. 223). This statement captures the main contribution of this volume: it presents the reader with a series of novel approaches and challenges for non-market valuation, but also provides readers motivation in the form of real applications. Also, given that it covers both stated preference (SP) and revealed preference (RP) methods, it serves as a nice complement to this year’s release of Preference Data for Environmental Valuation (Whitehead, Haab, and Huang 2011), which focuses on the merging of these two sources of data for improved welfare estimation....
I don't recall any payment being made to Dan for this mention, so thanks!
