| Abstract: | It has been recognized for some time that when cost-benefit analysis is applied to irreversible environmental decisions, such as that of developing or preserving wilderness land, there can be an option value associated with the preservation decision, which arises when there is future uncertainty with respect to the benefits of development or preservation. In this paper the provenance of option value is examined and it is shown that an important cause is a special kind of uncertainty, viz. the possibility of reversals in direction of the relative valuations of wilderness land and developed land, a property we refer to as ditonicity. It is shown that the more ditonic the relative valuation process the greater the deviance between the certainty-equivalence development policy and the stochastically optimal one, and thus by implication the greater the option value. In the two cases with zero ditonicity, when relative wilderness valuations always increase or always decrease (even though in a stochastic fashion), there is zero option value. The model used assumes that service flows from wilderness and developed land are size-dependent, with future relative values known only in terms of a stochastic process, which can take jumps up or down of the same proportional size, at random times. Development can be partial or total and can occur in impulses at any time over an infinite time horizon. |
