Overview
There are many economic analysis options to consider when making decisions about coastal projects and programs. Use the Overview of Options below to choose appropriate approaches for meeting your economic objectives, and then use the guides to approaches and methods to navigate the process.
These additional documents on Common Economic Terms and Choosing a Discount Rate may help you with a number of the approaches below.
Overview of Options
| Option | Description |
| Options for Economic Analysis for Decision Making | Identifying the objective for conducting an economic analysis can help you decide which approach to consider for your project. Use this guide to connect your objective with possible methods, examples, and the relative amount of resources required. |
| Benefits Valuation Guidance for Decision Making | Use this guide to identify common and appropriate methods you should consider when conducting a benefit-cost analysis, or simply estimating benefits. |
Economic Approaches
Benefits Valuation Methods
| Method | Description |
| Benefits Valuation Guidance for Decision Making | Use this guide to identify common and appropriate methods you should consider when conducting a benefit-cost analysis, or simply estimating benefits. |
| Benefit Transfer | Learn more about estimating the values of ecosystem benefits in a location or context of interest when values are not available from an original study. |
| Damages Avoided and Replacement Cost | Learn more about two ways to value natural infrastructure using decreased costs as a substitute for a benefit. |
| Hedonic Valuation | Learn more about a type of revealed preference method that examines individual behavior in markets related to ecological services and teases out values from those decisions. |
| Travel and Opportunity Cost | Learn more about these two methods for valuation that are used together when the resource being valued is a physical location that requires time and/or money to visit. |
| Willingness to Pay | Learn more about estimating nonmarket values using stated preferences, with respondents stating their choices in a statistically designed survey. |
