Compare methods

	Benefit Transfer Valuation	Deliberative Monetary Valuation
Field	Environmental Economics	Environmental Economics
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2015	2007
Originator	Robert J. Johnston, John Rolfe, Randall S. Rosenberger & Roy Brouwer	Clive L. Spash (and the deliberative-valuation tradition)
Type	Pipeline for transferring existing valuation estimates to new policy sites	Deliberative pipeline combining group reasoning with monetary valuation
Seminal source	Johnston, R. J., Rolfe, J., Rosenberger, R. S., & Brouwer, R. (Eds.). (2015). Benefit Transfer of Environmental and Resource Values: A Guide for Researchers and Practitioners. Springer.	Spash, C. L. (2007). Deliberative monetary valuation (DMV): Issues in combining economic and political processes to value environmental change. Ecological Economics, 63(4), 690-699.
Aliases	Value Transfer, Benefits Transfer, Environmental Value Transfer, Function Transfer	Deliberated Willingness to Pay, Group-Based Environmental Valuation, Citizens' Jury Valuation, Social Willingness to Pay
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	Deliberative monetary valuation is a hybrid method that combines the deliberative processes of political theory with the monetary metric of environmental economics, eliciting willingness to pay for environmental change through structured group discussion rather than isolated individual survey responses. In Clive Spash's 2007 analysis, the approach responds to a central criticism of conventional stated-preference methods — that they assume people arrive with well-formed preferences and treat them as private consumers — by giving participants information, time, and the company of others with whom to reason before expressing a value. Deliberation can produce individual willingness-to-pay figures formed through discussion, or genuinely social values agreed by the group acting as citizens. Spash stresses that the resulting numbers can rest on very different ethical bases, from market exchange to fair prices to expressive or arbitrated social judgments, which complicates their interpretation as standard welfare measures.