Deliberative Monetary Valuation (DMV) and Democratic Valuation (DV): A Response to Bartkowski and Lienhoop (2017)

Bartkowski and Lienhoop (2017) comment on the DV approach which I proposed in an earlier issue. They conclude that DMV overcomes some flaws of conventional stated preference (SP) methods, addresses many of my concerns and at the same time avoids some of the problems generated by DV. Several of their comments are debatable. A closer look at DMV in comparison with DV and conventional SP methods shows that Bartkowski and Lienhoop's DMV approach addresses only one out of six major issues with conventional SP methods - the lack of opportunities for group discussion. My conclusion therefore remains unaffected: Due to the many technical issues with measuring individual willingness to pay (WTP), valuations based on majority voting principles are not only more transparent and more democratically legitimate than conventional SP or DMV. They may also produce superior proxies for aggregated individual WTP.