Benefit Transfer Method

Benefit transfer is the practice of estimating the economic value of a nonmarket good — clean water, a recreation site, an endangered species, an avoided health risk — at a new 'policy site' by adapting value estimates from one or more existing 'study sites' where primary valuation research was already conducted. Because original contingent-valuation, choice-experiment, or hedonic studies are expensive and slow, analysts facing limited time and budgets transfer existing results, ranging from simply borrowing a single dollar value (unit value transfer) to transplanting an entire estimated valuation function (function transfer) or predicting from a meta-regression of many prior studies.