Talk:Cost–benefit analysis/Archives/2012

December 2006
I myself am a huge fan of Bent Flyvbjerg and consider his works of high significance - I do not think, however, that the references should be so much overwhelmed with his articles: after all, CBA is the main issue here. I would rather expect links to CBA-specific materials and guides - like, for example, the EU guide to CBA, also EIB has a guide of their own - and both are worth reading.

87.126.175.101 16:36, 21 December 2006 (UTC) Assen

Cost-benefit analyses are present in every facet of life & business. This article focuses far too much on engineering & financial projects. Such analyses are applied daily, in every human being's life. Even children regularly compare the expected benefit of the candy bar to its cost.

This is a very, very general term, and the article should reflect such.

Evolutionary biology
This section is totally off topic and should be deleted. CBA deals with quantifying economic costs and benefits using the common measuring rod of money and taking into account its time value. This attempts to value some non-market transactions as if they were carried out in markets. But markets and monetary values are unique to our species and don't really exist for other species. As one wag said, he never saw a dog trading bones with another dog. Thus while evolutionary biology may talk of costs and benefits, it is really referring to something totally different from that considered in CBA. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Patrick Grady (talk • contribs) 22:16, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Merging articles
There are multiple similar articles under different names. This article is not sufficiently distinct from a the business case article. It could be argued that it is also too similar to financial analysis, although some might hold that cost-benefits and business cases might include "non-financial" considerations.Hubbardaie 04:49, 16 June 2007 (UTC)


 * There seem to be a few in this space. I agree that business case and cost-benefit analysis are effectively used as synonyms and there may be more.  Also, I disagree that "cost-effectiveness analysis" and "benefit-effectiveness analysis" are "slightly different".  Nobody has made any attempt at showing practical distinctions among these concepts that are, in fact, widely recognized.  Seems like someone is just playing this by ear.BillGosset 12:37, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Keep Applied Information Economics
Applied Information Economics is at least as relevant as most of the other items on the list. The AIE article has been accepted as sufficiently notable and verifiable to keep. Whomever disputes whether that should be linked here should read the AIE article first.Hubbardaie 01:49, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Most sophisticated application is in Transport?
I have removed the following, which made up the entirety of the "Transport" section under "Application", "The most sophisticated application of cost-benefit analysis is in the transport sector."

I have great doubts that this is true; unless a valid citaiton can be produced, I don't think that it belongs in the article.--67.86.174.16 19:55, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Benefit-Cost analysis
In the US, common parlance is to say "cost-benefit analysis" but economists exclusively term and calculate "Benefit-cost analysis." I am fairly certain that page should be titled and written to refer to benefit-cost analysis exclusively, but I could be dissuaded.160.94.147.188 (talk) 18:36, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Plans
I had been hoping to add something about the net present value of the tax base when making decisions about things like education (i.e., the economic value of turning would-be high school dropout taxpayers into college graduate taxpayers.) I've written about this extensively elsewhere, as have others (e.g. .) &mdash; Cup co  18:49, 20 September 2012 (UTC)