Participants in contingent valuatio

Participants in contingent valuation surveys and jurors setting punitive damages in civil trials provide
answers denominated in dollars. These answers are better understood as expressions of attitudes than as
indications of economic preferences. Well-established characteristics of attitudes and of the core
process of affective valuation explain several robust features of dollar responses: high correlations with
other measures of attractiveness or aversiveness, insensitivity to scope, preference reversals, and the
high variability of dollar responses relative to other measures of the same attitude.