Competition is recognized as a key driver of growth and innovation. Competition ensures that businesses continually improve their goods and services while striving to reduce their costs. Anti-competitive conduct by businesses, such as price-fixing, causes harm to the economy, to other businesses, and to consumers. It is small businesses and the consumer who ultimately pay the price for anti-competitive conduct. A coherent competition policy that is both effectively implemented and effectively enforced is essential in driving growth and innovation in a market economy. The importance of...

Contingent valuation is a survey-based procedure that attempts to estimate how much households are willing to pay for specific programs that improve the environment or prevent environmental degradation. For decades, the method has been the center of debate regarding its reliability: does it really measure the value that people place on environmental changes? Bringing together leading voices in the field, this timely book tells a unified story about the interrelated features of contingent valuation and how those features affect its reliability. Through empirical analysis and review of past...

Foundations of Stated Preferences Elicitation provides the reader with stated preference data collection methods, discrete choice models, and statistical analysis tools that can be used to forecast demand and assess welfare impacts for new or modified products or services in real markets, and summarize the conditions under which the reliability of these methods has been demonstrated or can be tested. One focus is the collection of preference and related data from consumer responses in hypothetical choice experiments, particularly conjoint analysis methods that have proven useful in market...