Non-use value is the value that people assign to economic goods (including

public goods In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)Oakland, W. H. (1987). Theory of public goods. In Handbook of public economics (Vol. 2, pp. 485-535). Elsevier. is a good that is both non-excludable and non-riva ...

) even if they never have and never will use it. It is distinguished from

use value Use value (german: Gebrauchswert) or value in use is a concept in classical political economy and Marxist economics. It refers to the tangible features of a commodity (a tradeable object) which can satisfy some human requirement, want or need, or ...

, which people derive from direct use of the good. The concept is most commonly applied to the value of natural and built resources. Non-use value as a category may include: * "

option value Option or Options may refer to: Computing *Option key, a key on Apple computer keyboards *Option type, a polymorphic data type in programming languages *Command-line option, an optional parameter to a command *OPTIONS, an HTTP request method ...

" – the value placed on individual willingness to pay for maintaining an asset or resource even if there is little or no likelihood of the individual actually ever using it, occurring because of uncertainty about future supply (the continued existence of the asset) and potential future demand (the possibility that it may someday be used). * "

bequest value Bequest value, in economics, is the value of satisfaction from preserving a natural environment or a historic environment, in other words natural heritage or cultural heritage for future generations. It is often used when estimating the value of ...

" – values placed on individual willingness to pay for maintaining or preserving an asset or resource that has no use now, so that it is available for

future generations Future generations are cohorts of hypothetical people not yet born. Future generations are contrasted with current and past generations, and evoked in order to encourage thinking about intergenerational equity. The moral patienthood of future ge ...

. *"

Existence value Existence values are a class of economic value, reflecting the benefit people receive from knowing that a particular environmental resource, such as Antarctica, the Grand Canyon, endangered species, or any other organism or thing exists. Existenc ...

" – an unusual and somewhat controversial class of economic value, reflecting the benefit people receive from knowing that a particular environmental resource, such as Antarctica, the Grand Canyon, endangered species, Sharri Dogs or any other organism or thing exists. * "altruistic value" – the value placed on individual willingness to pay for maintaining an asset or resource that is not used by the individual, so that others may make use of it. Its value arises from others' use of the asset or resource. Rick Freeman (1993) suggests yet another variant that he calls "pure non-use value", defined as the value that occurs for an individual when current prices preclude use of a good, but there exists some lower price at which the individual would use the good. The continued availability of the good provides some value to the individual insofar as s/he may eventually be in a position to use the good. All of these categories are offspring of the original concept of

that was introduced into the

cost benefit analysis In production, research, retail, and accounting, a cost is the value of money that has been used up to produce something or deliver a service, and hence is not available for use anymore. In business, the cost may be one of acquisition, in which ...

lexicon in 1964 by

Burton Weisbrod Burton A. Weisbrod (born February 13, 1931 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American economist who pioneered the theory of option value, and the theory of why voluntary nonprofit organizations exist, He also developed the methodology for valuing vol ...

to justify individuals' valuation of goods, assets and resources that they do not actually use.Weisbrod, Burton. 1964. "Collective Consumption Services of Individual Consumption Goods," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 78 (3):471-477 In general, it is not possible to use market prices or other

revealed preference Revealed preference theory, pioneered by economist Paul Anthony Samuelson in 1938, is a method of analyzing choices made by individuals, mostly used for comparing the influence of policies on consumer behavior. Revealed preference models assume t ...

methods to measure non-use value. As a result, "stated preference" survey methods are generally used, including most prominently

contingent valuation Contingent valuation is a survey-based economic technique for the valuation of non- market resources, such as environmental preservation or the impact of externalities like pollution. While these resources do give people utility, certain aspects ...

methods (CVM).

References

{{Reflist Theory of value (economics)

See also

References