Building on available theory, this work uses controlled laboratory experiments to investigate the budgetary and the economic performance of competitive tenders for allocating conservation contracts to landholders. Experiments have been replicated in two different countries to check for robustness of results. We find that auctions outperform the more traditional fixed-price schemes only in the one-shot setting. With repetition, the auctions quickly lose their edge. Our results suggest that previous estimates of conservation auction performance are too optimistic.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.