Willingness to Pay for Information: An Analyst's Guide

This paper defines, illustrates, and critiques the different ways in which researchers have contemplated and estimated a consumer's willingness to pay for a particular attribute of a good or service. In particular, the authors are interested in exploring the apparent difficulty in measuring willingness to pay for information. It becomes more complicated to measure the value of having information when the actual information influences demand in its own right. This implies that information such as food dating is likely to be underproduced in a free market, even less than it is given the public goods aspect of the attribute. It also means that the bias in measuring willingness to pay will depend on whether the attribute in question adds value to the good.