Creating vs. maintaining threshold public goods in conservation policies

Conservation policies provide strong incentives to farmers to contribute to the environmental protection. One concern of such policies is to create and/or maintain a variety of valuable public goods. One main difference between creating and maintaining public good is that farmers are asked to create resources in the first policy, while in the other, they have to maintain unchanged an existing level of resources. While conservation policies indifferently aim at both creating and maintaining a variety of public goods since they provide similar incentive for both policies, it is possible that farmers behave differently in the two contexts. This paper aims at testing this framing effect. The originality of our approach is to combine both framing and threshold dimensions by comparing maintaining and creating contexts using threshold public goods experiments. First, the creating treatment corresponds to a classical Voluntary Contribution Mechanism whereas the maintaining treatment corresponds to a setting where all tokens are initially placed in the public investment and subjects can withdraw tokens. Second, we test for this hypothesis in the case of Provision Point Mechanism experiments with three different threshold levels. The results are that first, consistent with theoretical predictions, contributions rise with threshold level, with exception for the highest level. Second, individuals tend to be less cooperative in the maintaining frame rather than in the creating frame. Finally, framing effects seem to be more effective under higher threshold levels. Important consequences of these results can be found for the management of agri-environmental resources.