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Abstract
Policy-based markets for environmental services include government procurement,
private procurement to satisfy regulatory requirements and private procurement
through government offset markets. These markets are increasingly popular and raise
questions about optimal procurement under different regulatory frameworks. The
design of these schemes draws together issues in auction design and contract theory.
Using a mixed adverse selection, moral hazard model, we show that optimal contract
design may differ significantly between procurement and regulatory policy environments.
We model risk averse landholders to preserve a key feature of the policy
environment. These findings have implications for the design of pollution reduction
schemes and the rehabilitation of environmental assets.