The Economics of Synthetic Rhino Horns

Frederick Chen

Ecological Economics, 2017, vol. 141, issue C, 180-189

Abstract: To examine the potential impact of synthetic horns to reduce rhino poaching, a formal model of the rhino horn market in which there exist firms with the capability to produce high quality synthetic horns is presented and studied. The analysis shows that whether the availability of synthetic horns would decrease the equilibrium supply of wild horns—and how much the reduction would be—depends on market structure—i.e., how competitive the synthetic horn production sector is—and on how substitutable the synthetic horns are for wild horns. The implications of these results for conservation policies are derived and discussed. Synthetic horn producers would benefit more by promoting their products as being superior to wild horns, but this could increase horn prices and lead to more rhino poaching. For conservation purposes, it may be beneficial to incentivize firms to produce inferior fakes—synthetic horns that are engineered to be undesirable in some respect but difficult for buyers to distinguish from wild horns. The analysis also shows that promoting competition in the production of synthetic horns in general is desirable from a conservation standpoint as synthetic horn producers may prefer to keep prices at a high enough level that could still encourage significant amount of poaching.

Keywords: Conservation; Rhinos; Rhino horns; Poaching; Synthetic horns; Fake horns; Adverse selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800916310308
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:ecolec:v:141:y:2017:i:c:p:180-189

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.06.003

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().