The Optimal Timing of an Exhaustible, Reversible Wilderness Development Project
提出荒野开发项目的决策不应局限于“现在或永不”的两极，而应视为连续选择，探讨了不确定性下确定最佳开发时机的正确程序。
Decisions about wilderness development projects are almost always reached on a nowor-never basis. The entrepreneur-developer seeks to undertake a project as soon as possible, and environmentalist-preservationist tries to prevent it from ever occurring. The decision process encourages this dichotomization: some agency, legislature, or court listens to both views and declares one side winner.1 In essence, such a procedure restricts choice to two extreme points of what should logically be a continuous set. These notes seek to illuminate correct procedures for deciding when to undertake a wilderness development project; from this more general view of problem, usual decisions, now or never, emerge simply as possible corner solutions. Advocates of wilderness preservation have often in past recommended postponement of a development project, but on grounds of uncertainty about future benefits that will be derived from preserved wilderness. Indeed, there are two kinds of uncertainty. One, many of uses of wilderness are unpriced (or seriously underpriced), which means that markets provide inaccurate (if any) information about willingness to pay and that conceptually and empirically more tenuous nonmarket estimators must be utilized.2 And two, future uses of wilderness may be dramatically different in kind and not just amount, and these may be currently unfathomable (not to mention unquantifiable). Accordingly, the expected benefits of an irreversible (wilderness development)