2008 AERE Fellow: Alan Randall
Alan Randall is an imposing figure, not only physically but professionally and intellectually as well. He has been a leading scholar in the theory and application of non-market valuation and benefit cost analysis for over 30 years.
Among Alan’s most influential early works is his seminal JEEM paper in 1974 on contingent valuation using bidding games, co-authored with Ives and Eastman. This paper was an early empirical application of bidding games, which discusses the effectiveness of this as a value elicitation method. It won an AERE Publication of Enduring Quality award in 1991, and is among the most cited articles in JEEM.
One letter of support for Alan’s nomination states: “The article is really a cornerstone in the field of non-market valuation…[It] transformed non-market valuation from an occasional experiment with recreational sites and housing prices, to a practice at the core of environmental and policy analysis.” It goes on to say: “It is difficult to imagine the counterfactual of non-market valuation, or a vital, policy-oriented environmental economics, without Alan’s 1974 contribution.”
This article was followed by a long list of subsequent contributions on benefit cost analysis and the measurement of welfare changes, several of which he published with his former students. These include his 1980 paper in which he identified bounds for various welfare measures in the context of project evaluation, and his 1989 paper showing that conventional benefit cost outcomes are systematically biased when the number of policy proposals under consideration becomes large.
At the same time that Alan was engaged in this study of the methods for implementing benefit cost analysis, he was asking probing questions about the adequacy of this normative framework in contexts such as species preservation and biodiversity, where intergenerational issues are paramount. This questioning and inquiry led to his work on the Safe Minimum Standard as a response to the irreversibility and uncertainty surrounding many long run conservation challenges, and its application in the context of sustainability. In addition, his work exploring the relationships between benefit cost analysis and the major schools of Western philosophy is both original and insightful.
Alan’s more recent work has included the study of incentive-based mechanisms for controlling agricultural nonpoint pollution, ecosystem and habitat conservation, and valuation of the outputs from multifunctional agricultural systems.
Beyond his own research, Alan has been very influential through his contributions to graduate and undergraduate mentoring and teaching. At the graduate level, he has mentored 27 PhD students, several of whom are now prominent scholars in the profession. And he continues to work closely and publish with his former graduate students.
At the undergraduate level, he authored a well-known textbook, Resource Economics: An Economic Approach to Natural Resource and Environmental Policy, which, according to one letter of support, “must also rank among his most significant contributions to the profession.” The letter states: “Previous textbooks in environmental and resource economics presented the traditional view of environmental problems as extensions of land and institutional economics. Alan’s text brought a new perspective…a perspective shaped by general equilibrium analysis, microeconomics, and applied welfare economics.”
Alan’s many contributions have been recognized by others as well. He is a fellow the American Agricultural Economics Association (now the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association) and a fellow of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Association.
For his numerous contributions to the development of the theory and application of stated-preference methods in non-market valuation; his insights into the theoretical and ethical foundations of benefit cost analysis; his influential perspective on market failures and applied welfare economics; and his outstanding mentoring of graduate students; we hereby induct Alan Randall as a 2008 Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economist.
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