Contingent Valuation Analysis of Willingness to Pay To Reduce Childhood Obesity

Several recent surveys have asked Americans whether they support policies to reduce childhood obesity. There is reason for skepticism of such surveys because people are not confronted with the tax costs of such policies when they are asked whether they support them. This paper uses contingent valuation (CV), a method frequently used to estimate people's willingness to pay (WTP) for goods or services not transacted in markets, applied to unique data from New York State, to estimate the willingness to pay to reduce childhood obesity. The willingness to pay data have considerable face validity; they correlate in predictable ways with observed characteristics of respondents. The mean WTP of New Yorkers for a 50% reduction in childhood obesity is $47.25, which implies a total WTP by New York residents of $692.3 million. This vastly exceeds the implied savings in external costs, suggesting that the public supports public health initiatives not only to reduce external costs, but also altruistically. Despite the large WTP relative to the savings in external costs, the WTP estimated using the CV techniques in this paper are somewhat lower than those implied by previous surveys that did not