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ECONOMIC VALUATION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE ■ 91
able to capture in principle all relevant intangible eff ects. Th ese methods are usually
grouped under the heading of multicriteria analysis (Nijkamp et al. 1990).
Research cases can be found to show how and where multicriteria analysis in the
cultural heritage fi eld may be applied (Coccossis and Nijkamp 1995). Multicriteria
analysis off ers an opportunity to assess and weight simultaneously qualitative
and quantitative eff ects of plans or programs. Given the broad range of
value-generating aspects of cultural heritage, multicriteria analysis allows one, in
principle, to deal also with qualitative categorical information in economic evaluation
and to address policy trade-off s by assigning policy weights to the diff erent
attributes of cultural heritage. Oft en multicriteria analysis is pursued on an itemby-item
stated preference evaluation in regard to diff erent policy criteria. Such
criteria may not only relate to economic aspects but also to social, environmental,
and broader cultural aspects.
Th is approach allows one to take account of distributional issues, by either
including distributional elements explicitly in the evaluation criteria or by having
such interests refl ected in the weight vector in a multi-criteria analysis. Th e
multicriteria approach is adequate in the case of the assessment of distinct alternatives
to be decided on, but is less eff ective when it comes to a broader societal
evaluation of cultural heritage.
Stated Preference Methods
Stated preference analysis is essentially rooted in behavioral economics, but in
the past decades it has found extensive application in the case of economic evaluation
of non-market or quasi-market goods, when the essential evaluation concept
centers on the individual willingness to pay. For a market good, the marginal
willingness to pay is equal to its price, which is clearly convenient for applied
welfare analysis. However, many valuable goods are not traded on a market—and
cultural heritage off ers many examples, such as the benefi ts of living in historic
city districts. An optimal design of public policies for cultural heritage calls for an
estimate of the willingness to pay also for non-market goods.
In general, stated preference methods aim to uncover what individuals are
willing to pay or are willing to accept in case of a change in the availability of a
public good. Th is research is oft en conducted through the use of survey questionnaires.
(See box 4.4.) Contingent valuation methods form an important subclass
of preference elicitation methods and focus directly on willingness to pay
by using open-ended questions (Mitchell and Carson 1989). A second subset of
stated preference techniques is based on choice experiments, in which one tries to
estimate the preferences of people from the choices they make between bundles
of attributes that describe the good to be valued at diff erent levels (Noonan 2003;
Snowball 2008). Although conjoint choice analysis extracts the willingness to pay