Designing species-specific conservation contracts in a heterogeneous landscape with unobservable conservation costs and benefits

Emeline Hily and Jean-Claude Gégout
Additional contact information
Jean-Claude Gégout: AgroParisTech, UMR 1092 LERFOB, F-54000 Nancy, France

No 2016-02, Working Papers - Cahiers du LEF from Laboratoire d'Economie Forestiere, AgroParisTech-INRA

Abstract: Paying for species-specific conservation requires to encourage landowners to provide both habitat suitability in order to establish conservation networks, and species protection in order to maintain its presence. We investigate the possibility to define differentiated contracts for species-specific conservation when both conservation costs and benefits are unobservable and heterogeneous. We develop a common-value principal-agent model, in which the principal’s preferences for both types of conservation benefits is explicitly taken into account. The level of effective protection benefits provided by an agent is captured by her level of unobservable protection costs. We analytically demonstrate the possibility to define differentiated conservation payments despite a non-responsiveness situation, known to usually lead to bunching equilibria. Results of numerical landscape-scale simulations show that contracts derived from a common-value model can perform better than those derived from a classic adverse selection model. We find differentiated contracts, which are closer to first-best ones and show interesting cost-effectiveness performances.

Keywords: climate change; adaptation; externality; PPPs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C51 D81 Q23 Q28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2016-02, Revised 2016-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www6.nancy.inra.fr/lef/Cahiers-du-LEF/2016/2016-02 First version, 2010

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:lef:wpaper:2016-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers - Cahiers du LEF from Laboratoire d'Economie Forestiere, AgroParisTech-INRA Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sylvain CAURLa ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).