Background:
The choice of elicitation format is a crucial but tricky aspect of stated preferences surveys. It affects not only the quantity and quality of the information collected on respondents’ willingness to pay (WTP) but also the potential errors/biases that prevent their true WTP from being observed.

Objectives:
We propose a new elicitation mechanism, the circular payment card (CPC), and show that it helps overcome the drawbacks of the standard payment card (PC) format. It uses a visual pie chart representation without start or end points: respondents spin the circular card in any direction until they find the section that best matches their true WTP.

Methods:
We performed a contingent valuation survey regarding a mandatory health insurance scheme in Tunisia, a middle-income country. Respondents were randomly allocated into one of three subgroups and their WTP was elicited using one of three formats: open-ended (OE), standard PC and the new CPC. We compared the elicited WTP.

Results:
We found significant differences in unconditional and conditional analyses. Our empirical results consistently indicated that the OE and standard PC formats led to significantly lower WTP than the CPC format.

Conclusion:
Overall, our results are encouraging and suggest CPC could be an effective alternative format to elicit ‘true’ WTP.

Natural disasters due to climate change (like floods, hurricanes, heat waves or droughts) combine a risk of large losses and a low probability of occurrence, requiring decisions to be made in uncertain universes. However, the inability of standard decision under uncertainty models to provide rankings when some outcomes are catastrophic impedes rational (public) decision-making. This paper examines the role of emotions in individuals’ choices among alternatives involving catastrophic events, either in real life (flooding) or artificial (laboratory experiment) situations. We report a survey on 599 respondents aimed at determining how people exposed to different levels of flood risk form beliefs and make decisions under uncertainty before and after emotion-generating events. Data on their emotions, the emotions they expect to experience, their personality and psychological determinants, their symptoms before and after emotion-generating events are collected and analyzed. In parallel with this survey, experimental protocols replicate the emotional experience of a catastrophe and measure its impact on behavior and formation of beliefs. Emotions are induced by framing effects and measured through a self-declared worry scale. We collect behavioral data (insurance choice, subjective beliefs, performance) and measure how they are affected by the emotions felt during the decision-making. These protocols test some assumptions in the survey using experimental paradigms from psychophysics that allow us to control the sources of uncertainty experienced by the subjects. Results confirm that emotions connected with the nature of the risk can significantly affect desire to reduce it. The survey provides valuable material for comparative analysis, revealing how actual experience of an anticipated event affects decisions. The experiments show that emotions affect the decision-making process and the forming of probabilistic beliefs.

Local land-use policies are determined by a wide range of considerations that do not always favor open-space preservation. To identify them, a field study was undertaken in South Eastern France via semi-directive interviews with people responsible for municipal land-use policies. We use it to compare a qualitative (i.e. manual) discourse analysis with two quantitative (i.e. computer-assisted) analyses and combine them to identify the drivers of land-use policies, especially with regard to urban sprawl. Performing all three analyses allows us to switch back and forth between a local empirical approach and large-scale modeling and methods. This should enrich micro-economic models by clarifying more complex local features, like unbalanced relationships with neighboring municipalities or why “agriculture” should be considered as an independent interest group.

We extend the individual dynamic model of lifetime resource allocation to assess the monetary value given to the increase in survival probabilities for every member of a household induced by improved air quality. We interpret this monetary value as VPF (value of a prevented fatality), which can also be expressed as a flow of discounted VOLY (value of life years) lost, and account for potential altruism towards other household members. We use a French air pollution contingent valuation survey that provides a description of the life-length reduction implied by a change in air pollution exposure. By privatising the public commodity air pollution, we succeed in ruling out any form of altruism (towards others living today and towards future generations) except altruism towards one's family. We estimate a mean VOLY of € 2001 140,000, a 30% premium for VOLY in perfect health w.r.t. average expected health status, and a mean VPF of € 2001 1.45 million for the respondent, all context-specific. In addition, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between his/her age and VOLY/VPF, and significant benevolence only towards children under 18.