Willingness to allocate public budget and Participatory Value Evaluation

Particularly in western countries Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is the most widely used appraisal method supporting government decision-making on transport projects. A CBA expresses the impacts of a government project in monetary metrics based on the number of euros affected individuals and parties are willing to pay from their private income. However, the private WTP valuation approach is contested in the literature. One central critique is that this approach fails to consider that private choices may not fully reflect citizens' preferences over public goods and means. In response to this critique, academics developed three types of preference elicitation methods: (1) Collective willingness to pay; (2) Willingness to allocate public budget; (3) Participatory Value Evaluation. This chapter elaborates on these preference elicitation methods. We provide empirical examples of the application of these methods in the transport literature and we pay attention to the fact that these three classes of preference elicitation methods give individuals the opportunity to express a broader range of preferences compared to private WTP-based valuation methods.