Non-market Valuation

Commenting on Cowen's provocative thought on the economics of fashion, Kiesling relates it to environmental economics. So much relevant to what I am working on now, here's a quote from Kiesling:

"... I think the consumer preferences underlying shopping and fashion are hugely complicated, and hard to disentangle. One reason for that is very similar to what I discussed with my students today about contingent valuation studies to determine the value of environmental amenities: our preferences are constructed, and are highly contextual; they aren't just written in a book or tattooed on the back of the neck. In many cases we don't even know what our preferences are over something until we are confronted with it. And then once we are confronted with it, we do the "compared to what" opportunity cost calculation, and choose whether or not we want to buy it. We may not be able to articulate all of the aspects of the choice, either... Just like the desire to preserve charismatic megafauna, fashion also has a very visceral, emotional component to consumer preferences, something that reaches into the core of our souls and taps into the human desire to do things with our resources that represent something about our individual beings...
Unlike fashion, though, environmental amenities are non-market goods; markets do not typically exist as mechanisms to enable us to determine how we value them, and whether others value them more or less than we do..."

Yup, that's exactly how it is. Non-market valuation. Kiesling is talking about using contingent valuation. My work is an extension of this approach, namely contingent valuation with conjoint eliciation process. This is more indirect than the standard contingent valuation. The latter has been subject to criticism for its common form, referendum choice, is subject to high protest response rates. The conjoint elicitation process tries to ease some pressure on the respondents by providing a set of repeated choice occasions meant to map the repondents preference over certain specified choice attributes.