Abstract
It has recently been argued that altruistic motives for paying for a public sector project should be ignored in a cost-benefit analysis. The reason is that including altruism would mean a kind of double counting of the project's benefits. This paper takes a look at these arguments, and derives cost-benefit rules which cover different kinds of altruism. The paper also provides some recommendations for the treatment of altruism in studies using the contingent valuation method.
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Johansson, PO. Altruism in cost-benefit analysis. Environmental and Resource Economics 2, 605–613 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00330286
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00330286