Eliciting Preferences for Public Goods in Nonmonetized Communities: Accounting for Preference Uncertainty

Labor time has been proposed as an alternative payment vehicle in eliciting preferences for public goods in nonmone-tized communities. However, we so far have no empirical evidence for situations where the labor-time elicitation format reduces the respondent’s contribution uncertainty. In this study we compare the uncertainty of people’s stated willingness to contribute time and money for a local public good in a nonmon-etized small-scale community in Papua New Guinea. We find that independently of con-version issues, uncertainty is reduced when respondents are asked to contribute time in-stead of money. Moreover, we find that risk aversion, risk apprehension, and risk expo-sure are significant predictors of uncertainty.