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Abstract
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 programs only in the one-shot setting. With repetition, the auctions
quickly lose their edge. The budget-constrained auction performs similarly to the target-constrained
in the one-shot setting but appears more robust to repetition. Our results suggest
that previous estimates of conservation auction performance are too optimistic, and we
propose a method for improving such estimates.