The Social Value of Animal Welfare: A Revealed Policy Preference Approach
Presented by:
Trevor Woolley
University of California, Berkeley
Thursday, January 15, 2026
12:00 pm-1:30 pm
Taylor-Hibbard Seminar Room (Rm103)
This paper develops and applies a revealed-preference framework to measure voter willingness to pay (WTP) for a public good that raises the price of a widely consumed private good. I study California’s Proposition 12 (2018), which man dated cage-free housing for hens by 2022 and was approved by 63% of voters despite raising egg prices. I assemble a novel dataset combining precinct-level referendum outcomes with Nielsen IQ retail scanner and consumer panel data on egg prices and market shares at the UPC–ZIP–month level. I first estimate consumers’ marginal WTP for the cage-free attribute using a random-coefficients logit model of egg demand, instrumenting for price with Hausman-style and cost-shifter instruments. I then estimate the distribution of total (Lindahl) WTP across precincts by regressing vote shares on predicted price impacts, treating the referendum as a large-scale dichotomous-choice experiment. The residual between total WTP and private (use) WTP for the quasi-public good (Prop 12) yields its non-use value: willingness to pay for animal welfare improvements independent of own consumption. I find that more than half of the support for Prop 12 cannot be explained by private benefits alone, consistent with widespread moral or public-good motivations. Methodologically, this paper demonstrates how market data and voting data can be combined to separate use and non-use components of public-good demand, providing a general approach for policy valuation when policies shift market prices.