Deliberation in Valuation and Decision Making: A Conceptual Clarification

Abstract

A voluminous literature addresses the weaknesses of standard stated preference methods used to value non-market environmental goods and services, such as contingent valuation and choice experiment. Deliberative Monetary Valuation (DMV) has emerged as a prominent alternative to the standard versions of these methods. It combines deliberative institutions with preference elicitation. Despite an anchorage in an extensive philosophical literature on deliberative democracy, the theoretical foundations of DMV are underinvestigated. A noteworthy exception is Bartkowski and Lienhoop (2018)’s effort to use Sen’s philosophical views to elaborate such theoretical foundations. The present conceptual contribution pursues this theoretical effort by pointing out two issues left unanswered by the above contribution. The first issue is: how can one ascertain that deliberation has attained its goal in DMV and, more broadly, in decision-making? (We term this the deliberative credentials issue.) The second issue is the role that economists and consultants involved in the proceedings of deliberation are supposed to play. (We term this the role of the analyst issue.) In order to clarify the kind of investigations that DMV or any alternative method should implement to be unequivocal on these issues, we use a formal framework introduced by Cailloux and Meinard (2019), designed to capture the stance that an individual has on a given topic once she has participated in a deliberation: her “deliberated judgment”. This framework allows to identify empirical questions that DMV do not tackle whereas answering these questions would be necessary to clarify the stance that DMV takes on the deliberative credentials issue. When it comes to the role of the analyst issue, our framework advocates an active role of the practitioner in creating what we call models of Deliberated Judgments. This framework thereby helps to characterize the normative stance adopted when implementing a deliberative approach.

Keywords

• valuation
• decision support
• justification
• empirical validation
• methodology