Willingness to accept

One way to get around this problem is to pose the question differently. Instead of asking ``How much are you willing to pay to get some environmental benefit?'', ask ``How much would you have to be paid to be willing to accept the current situation instead of one that would be better environmentally?'' That's the basis of a ``willingness to accept'' approach to valuation. Using the notation developed earlier that becomes

$$U(Y + WTA, E_0) \equiv U(Y, E_1) \quad .$$

The problem with this approach is that it's really easy for me, as someone an economist is interviewing, to ``game'' the system. For example, if someone asks me how much money I'd have to be given to be willing to accept oil drilling on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I could answer: $4 trillion. No matter how hard you tried to convince me to accept something less, I could maintain (and it might even be true) that I'd rather have my current income and no drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge than drilling and $4 trillion. What would I do with that much money anyway?¹³ But such an answer doesn't pass the smell test. It doesn't seem reasonable.

Both willingness to pay and willingness to accept suffer from the fact that there isn't actually a market, so it's very difficult to validate the expressions of value that are made against those expressions that involve a real market. Nonetheless, there is a lot of interest in these and other approaches and there are a lot of economists working hard to find ways to make them work.