Cost-Benefit Analysis provides accessible, comprehensive, authoritative, and practical treatments of the protocols for assessing the relative efficiency of public policies. Its review of essential concepts from microeconomics, and its sophisticated treatment of important topics with minimal use of mathematics helps students from a variety of backgrounds build solid conceptual foundations. It provides thorough treatments of time discounting, dealing with contingent uncertainty using expected surpluses and option prices, taking account of parameter uncertainties using Monte Carlo simulation and other types of sensitivity analyses, revealed preference approaches, stated preference methods including contingent valuation, and other related methods. Updated to cover contemporary research, this edition is considerably reorganized to aid in student and practitioner understanding, and includes eight new cases to demonstrate the actual practice of cost-benefit analysis. Widely cited, it is recognized as an authoritative source on cost-benefit analysis. Illustrations, exhibits, chapter exercises, and case studies help students master concepts and develop craft skills.

Cost-Benefit Analysis provides accessible, comprehensive, authoritative, and practical treatments of the protocols for assessing the relative efficiency of public policies. Its review of essential concepts from microeconomics, and its sophisticated treatment of important topics with minimal use of mathematics helps students from a variety of backgrounds build solid conceptual foundations. It provides thorough treatments of time discounting, dealing with contingent uncertainty using expected surpluses and option prices, taking account of parameter uncertainties using Monte Carlo simulation and other types of sensitivity analyses, revealed preference approaches, stated preference methods including contingent valuation, and other related methods. Updated to cover contemporary research, this edition is considerably reorganized to aid in student and practitioner understanding, and includes eight new cases to demonstrate the actual practice of cost-benefit analysis. Widely cited, it is recognized as an authoritative source on cost-benefit analysis. Illustrations, exhibits, chapter exercises, and case studies help students master concepts and develop craft skills.

Social experiments provide the most reliable guide to potential impacts of policy change because their methodology allows analysts to isolate the effect of the policy change from other, potentially distorting factors. This revised and updated edition of the Digest of Social Experiments documents 240 completed and 21 ongoing social experiments. In addition to the findings, each summary details target populations, policies tested, experimental designs and related issues, sites, key staff, sources of further information, and public access to the data. The authors also discuss the theory and practice of social experimentation, the reasons for conducting social experiments, the ethical issues, and non-experimental methodologies that have been proposed as substitutes. They examine the uses of social experiments in the policy process, and offer a brief history of social experimentation.

Social experiments use random assignment to measure the market or fiscal outcomes of policy interventions. Since the 1960s, they have become the major method for evaluating proposed changes in social programs. To judge the social gains of these experiments, policymakers, funders of experiments, the public, and those who conduct social experiments need realistic standards and expectations for judging.Social Experimentation and Public Policymaking advances that effort with a history of social experimentation and a theoretical framework for study of its techniques. The authors analyze five of the most prominent social experiments ever conducted, to explore their origins, the use of the resulting findings, and factors that influenced the use of the findings. The result is a comprehensive examination of the effectiveness of social experimentation and important insights into how this powerful tool can be used to improve public policy.