Broadening the Concept and Measurement of Existence Value

Recent efforts to refine the concept of existence value and to empirically measure it has led to an unnecessary narrowing of the concept of existence value. This paper uses the literature on public goods to argue that existence value is a much broader concept than proposed by several authors. Two commonly used but different empirical approaches to measuring existence values are compared and shown to lead to statistically different decompositions of total value between use and existence categories.