The value handbook: getting the most from your buildings and spaces.

The Value Handbook is a practical guide, showing how public sector organisations can get the most from ther buildings and spaces in their area. It brings together essential evidence about the benefits of good design, and demonstrates how understanding the different types of value created by the built environment (exchange value, use value, image value,social value, environmental value, and cultural value)is the key to realising its full potential.

The price of pain and the value of suffering.

Estimating the financial value of pain informs issues as diverse as the market price of analgesics, the cost-effectiveness of clinical treatments, compensation for injury, and the response to public hazards. Such valuations are assumed to reflect a stable trade-off between relief of discomfort and money. Here, using an auction-based health-market experiment, we show that the price people pay for relief of pain is strongly determined by the local context of the market, that is, by recent intensities of pain or immediately disposable income (but not overall wealth). The absence of a stable valuation metric suggests that the dynamic behavior of health markets is not predictable from the static behavior of individuals. We conclude that the results follow the dynamics of habit-formation models of economic theory, and thus, this study provides the first scientific basis for this type of preference modeling.