@article{Liu:334572,
      recid = {334572},
      author = {Liu, Zhaoyang and Banerjee, Simanti and Cason, Timothy N.  and Hanley, Nick and Liu, Qi and Xu, Jintao and Kontoleon,  Andreas},
      title = {Spatially Coordinated Conservation Auctions: A Framed  Field Experiment Focusing on Farmland Wildlife Conservation  in China},
      address = {2023-03},
      pages = {75},
      year = {2023},
      abstract = {This paper presents a framed field experiment from China  studying a spatially coordinated (SC) auction mechanism for  the allocation of agri-environmental contracts, which pay  farmers to change their agricultural practices to provide  environmental benefits. The SC auction is designed to  maximise a metric of environmental benefit that depends  both on site-specific environmental values and benefits due  to spatial coordination of conserved patches, subject to a  budget constraint. We investigate whether auction  performance can be improved by the introduction of  agglomeration bonus (AB) and joint bidding (JB) mechanisms.  The AB is a bonus payment awarded to neighbouring farmers  who bid individually but receive agrienvironmental  contracts simultaneously. The JB mechanism allows  neighbouring farmers to bid jointly and provides a bonus  payment for successful joint bids. We conducted  experimental SC auctions with a total of 432 Chinese  farmers randomly assigned to one of four treatments which  differed in whether the AB and JB mechanisms were adopted,  following a two-by-two full factorial experimental design.  Our empirical results suggest that the SC auction has  similar environmental performance regardless of whether an  AB is provided, although cost-effectiveness is 1 slightly  higher when AB is not provided. Moreover, introducing the  JB mechanism into the SC auction leads to lower  environmental performance and lower cost-effectiveness.  Finally, the AB mechanism achieves higher environmental  performance than the JB mechanism but has similar  cost-effectiveness.},
      url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/334572},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.334572},
}