9.
2Charles Cicchetti and Louis Wilde, Uniqueness, Irreversibility and the Theory of Nonuse Values," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, December 1992, 1122.
cost of expanding or recommencing production once it has been curtailed (irreversibility). After these conditions for options values were considered, subsequent literature turned to the discussion of the extent to which uniqueness (that is, there are no adequate substitutes in the natural market area of the resource), irreversibility, and non-reproducibility could be considered as necessary conditions for the presence of nonuse values.
From the point of view of the economist, use and nonuse values are anthropocentric, or human-centered. Consequently, considerable controversy has arisen among economists, lawyers and environmentalists particularly over the reliability, validity and consistency of proposed measurements of nonuse values resulting from changes in the quantity and quality of natural resources. Not all writers, however, agreed with these contentions: "...I believe that statistical concepts like validity, reliability and consistency are essentially meaningless when applied to a methodology for answering a question to which there is no correct answer. When markets are nonexistent and substitute measurements unavailable, dollar values become meaningless, unanchored to the social mechanisms and institutions that make them possible in the first place."3
Today's economic literature is filled with arguments about the significant problems surrounding the determination of monetary values of public goods. For a number of years, there existed a substantial spread in the proportional relationship between use and nonuse values: " . . . it is noteworthy that attempts throughout the 1970's to measure nonuse values used a proportional relationship for inferring nonuse from use values. The
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