As John has pointed out (for example see here and here), despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, researchers have taken to lazily citing economist Jerry Hausman's ill-founded, and wrong, repeat attack on contingent valuation* as face value evidence that stated preference surveys are worthless in the public policy arena. In fact, a quick Google Scholar search on 'Hopeless Hausman' finds that no less than 30 researchers have already cited Hausman's 'Dubious' work, despite the compelling, fair and balanced counter claims provided by Kling, Phaneuf and Zhao and Richard Carson in the same issue of the Journal of Economic Persepctive in which Hausman's opinion was published.
Because of the coincidental nature of the three paper symposium in the JEP, the opportunity for direct discussion of Hausman's poorly researched criticism was not afforded. Fortunately, the journal Applied Economics and Policy Perspectives has afforded me, Matt Interis, Dan Petrolia and John the opportunity to publish our reaction to Hausman's 'Hopeless' attack.
From the inbox:
I am pleased to inform you that I have decided to accept your submission...entitled "From Hopeless to Curious? Thoughts on Hausman’s “Dubious to Hopeless” Critique of Contingent Valuation" for publication in AEPP. Next, we have to move your article to production with the publisher for content editing and typesetting.
Here's the abstract:
Hausman (2012) “selectively” reviews the contingent valuation method (CVM) literature and fails to find progress over the 18 years since Diamond and Hausman (1994) argued that unquantified benefits and costs are preferred to those quantified by CVM. In this reflection, we provide counter-arguments to Hausman’s claims, not with the intent to convince the reader that the debate over CVM is settled in favor of the method, but to argue that the intellectual debate over CVM is ongoing, that dismissal of CVM is unwarranted, and that plenty of work remains to be done for the truly curious researcher.
Oh, SNAP. It's on like Donkey Kong.
Our paper has been moved into the production process and is scheduled to appear in the January, 2014 issue of AEPP (online prior to that). We will let you know when it's available, but for those who can't wait, and really want something to cite (and really this should be cited every time Hausman's work is cited--even if you read neither) here's a link to an earlier working paper version of the paper.
But you should note that we've saved some new surprises for the full version to appear in AEPP.
As they say, always leave them wanting more.
* Hausman, Jerry. "Contingent valuation: from dubious to hopeless." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 26.4 (2012): 43-56.
