Benefit Transfer Valuation

Benefit transfer is the practice of using economic value estimates from existing valuation studies to estimate the value of an environmental change at a new policy site where conducting a fresh primary study is not feasible. As systematized in Johnston, Rolfe, Rosenberger and Brouwer's 2015 guide, it ranges from simple unit-value transfer — borrowing a willingness-to-pay figure from a similar study — to function transfer, in which an estimated value function is applied using the characteristics of the new site and population, and meta-analytic transfer that pools many studies into a single predictive function. Because primary valuation through choice experiments or travel-cost studies is expensive and slow, benefit transfer is the workhorse of routine policy appraisal, allowing analysts to value ecosystem-service changes quickly while explicitly managing the error introduced by adapting evidence across contexts.