Social rewards and the design of voluntary incentive mechanism for biodiversity protection on farmland

Rupayan Pal, Ada Wossink and Prasenjit Banerjee ()
Additional contact information
Prasenjit Banerjee: University of Manchester

Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai Working Papers from Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India

Abstract: We examine how endogenous social preferences could affect economic incentive design to encourage biodiversity protection on private land. A 'green' farmer may enjoy esteem from leading by example if there are few farmers who do the right thing. In contrast a farmer without social preferences ('brown' farmer) might merely tick the boxes and is expected to shirk from the desired environmental actions whenever possible unless this affects their reputation. We analyze the design of an incentive scheme that takes into account both types of farmers ('green' or 'brown') under asymmetric information about their true motivation. It follows that under perfect Bayesian equilibrium, the regulator can separate out the farmer types in a two-period setting by monitoring their voluntary conservation actions in response to payment in the first period. The optimal mechanism would be a mixture of a facilitation contract with small monetary incentive but high visibility to keep 'green' farmers interested and a higher monetary-incentive contract to attract the brown farmers.

Keywords: Mechanism Design; Social Norm; Esteem; Motivation Crowding; Signalling; Public goods; Agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 D82 Q57 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2018-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-des, nep-env, nep-knm and nep-res
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.igidr.ac.in/pdf/publication/WP-2018-006.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Social Rewards and the Design of Voluntary Incentive Mechanism for Biodiversity Protection on Farmland (2018)
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:ind:igiwpp:2018-006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai Working Papers from Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shamprasad M. Pujar ().