Spatially Coordinated Conservation Auctions: A Framed Field Experiment Focusing on Farmland Wildlife Conservation in China

Zhaoyang Liu, Simanti Banerjee, Timothy Cason, Nick Hanley, Qi Liu, Jintao Xu and Andreas Kontoleon

No 334572, 97th Annual Conference, March 27-29, 2023, Warwick University, Coventry, UK from Agricultural Economics Society - AES

Abstract: This paper presents a framed field experiment from China studying a spatially coordinated (SC) auction mechanism for the allocation of agri-environmental contracts, which pay farmers to change their agricultural practices to provide environmental benefits. The SC auction is designed to maximise a metric of environmental benefit that depends both on site-specific environmental values and benefits due to spatial coordination of conserved patches, subject to a budget constraint. We investigate whether auction performance can be improved by the introduction of agglomeration bonus (AB) and joint bidding (JB) mechanisms. The AB is a bonus payment awarded to neighbouring farmers who bid individually but receive agrienvironmental contracts simultaneously. The JB mechanism allows neighbouring farmers to bid jointly and provides a bonus payment for successful joint bids. We conducted experimental SC auctions with a total of 432 Chinese farmers randomly assigned to one of four treatments which differed in whether the AB and JB mechanisms were adopted, following a two-by-two full factorial experimental design. Our empirical results suggest that the SC auction has similar environmental performance regardless of whether an AB is provided, although cost-effectiveness is 1 slightly higher when AB is not provided. Moreover, introducing the JB mechanism into the SC auction leads to lower environmental performance and lower cost-effectiveness. Finally, the AB mechanism achieves higher environmental performance than the JB mechanism but has similar cost-effectiveness.

Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Land Economics/Use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 75
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cna, nep-des, nep-env and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/334572/files/A ... lifeConservation.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Spatially coordinated conservation auctions: A framed field experiment focusing on farmland wildlife conservation in China (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aesc23:334572

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.334572

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 97th Annual Conference, March 27-29, 2023, Warwick University, Coventry, UK from Agricultural Economics Society - AES Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().