An assessment of market-based approaches to providing ecosystem services on agricultural lands

Market-based approaches are increasingly being advocated as tools for achieving the conservation of ecosystem services. We examine the reasons why markets so far appear to have failed to provide an efficient allocation of many ecosystem services, and identify the conditions under which markets deliver efficient resource allocation. We discuss different forms of market-based approaches to ecosystem services and identify the characteristics of services that make them better suited to one or another of these approaches. We find that lack of low-cost measurability and valuation currently precludes efficient allocation of many ecosystem services through market-based approaches. Still, some forms of market-based approaches hold promise for cost-effectively managing some ecosystem services provided by and to agricultural lands. In many cases some form of well-designed government involvement will be required to seek outcomes that protect the public interest.     

美国生态修复政策及其对我国林业重点工程的借鉴

美国自20世纪30年代以来,为遏制由于大规模土地开发导致的土壤表层侵蚀等生态退化,实施了一系列政策保护生态,防止水土流失,其中影响较大的包括土地休耕保护计划(CRP)、环境质量激励计划(EQIP)和保护支持计划(CSP)。通过分析三个计划的具体运作和实施成效,并结合我国林业重点工程的实施现状,提出一些政策建议。     

Financing entrepreneurship: Bank finance versus venture capital

This paper examines the entrepreneur's choice between bank finance and venture capital. With bank finance, the entrepreneur keeps full control of the firm and has efficient incentives to exert effort. With venture capital finance, there is a two-sided moral hazard problem as both the entrepreneur and venture capitalist (VC) provide unverifiable effort. The entrepreneur benefits from the VC's managerial input but must surrender partial ownership of the venture, thus diluting the entrepreneur's incentive to provide effort. Venture capital tends to be preferred to bank finance when VC productivity is high and entrepreneurial productivity is low.     

众筹中创新项目质量和报酬率的激励效应研究

众筹是整合社会分散财力资源从而实现筹资投资双方获得便利目的的一种有效的新型融资投资模式,属于互联网金融的一种形式.本文针对众筹过程中两大参与主体筹资方和投资方各自特征,依据成本收益理论,建立激励效用模型,考虑创新项目质量和报酬率两大因素的变化对众筹双方的期望效用的影响作用.研究结果表明:在三种不同的假设条件下,项目质量和报酬率两大因素影响众筹双方期望效用,进而可以激励双方主体,并且提出了众筹双方效用最优化状态的存在性.     

Can Consumers Buy Responsibly? Analysis and Solutions for Market Failures

This paper analyses one of the business case arguments for social responsibility: that corporate social responsibility plans are rewarded by consumers. This paper explores the ability of consumers to buy responsibly, identifies the main obstacles for responsible consumption, and suggests conditions for it to work. The review of previous studies leads us to conclude that consuming responsibly is seen as a time consuming activity, economically disadvantageous, and stressful. The main thesis of this paper is that unless market failures are corrected, consumers will not be able to buy responsibly, and therefore, market incentives for CSR are seriously threatened.

在整合渠道视角下分销渠道激励模式的构建

分销渠道激励对于促进渠道成员高效率合作有重要的作用。在阐述分销渠道激励概念的基础上,分析了对分销渠道成员激励的原因;明确了分销渠道激励的基础,阐释了整合渠道系统的构建;最后提出了整合渠道视角下的三种分销渠道激励模式:短期激励模式、长期激励模式和分销规划激励模式。     

Is participation in agri-environmental programs affected by liquidity and solvency?

Financial constraints, both in the short and long run, have an impact on economic well-being of farm families. Additionally, financial constraints have an impact on production efficiency and technology adoption. This study investigates factors affecting farmers’ participation in the agri-environmental programs like Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and the Environmental Quality Incentives Programs (EQIPs) in the U.S. particular attention is given to the roles of liquidity and solvency on participation in CRP and EQIP. Results show that both liquidity and solvency have a negative impact on participation in such programs. Additionally, we found that access to the Internet plays an important role in the farmer's decision to participate in CRP and EQIP. Our results also suggested that beginning farmers are more likely to participate in EQIP program.     

Guns and crime revisited

I focus on the effect of changes in public security (policing) on private security measures that potential victims can take. In particular, I look at the tradeoff between different types of private security measures – such as using or carrying guns, carrying less cash or keeping less valuables at home, and using burglar alarms or Lojack – and study how this tradeoff is affected by changes in public security. If private householders’ direct security expenses are strongly substitutable with public policing (e.g., for guns which may be more useful in badly policed areas), an increase in policing results in a drop in these expenses; it also results in carrying or keeping less cash (an indirect security measure which reduces the prize a criminal can seize). If, however, householders’ direct security expenses are “complementary” to policing in the sense that they are more effective when police response is rapid (e.g., for burglar alarms), more policing increases these expenses unless the efficacy of joint (public and private) security expenses on combating crime encounters very sharply diminishing returns; moreover, a rise in policing also induces carrying or keeping more cash. An increase in penalties increases the tendency to keep cash on hand, and also reduces crime, provided that as private precautions increase, with policing constant, it takes a larger increment in security spending to compensate for a specific drop in penalties. The results are consistent with some empirical trends in crime rates, policing, penalties and private precautions.     

INCENTIVES AND SOCIAL NORMS: A MOTIVATION‐BASED ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL NORMS

Abstract It is now commonplace to regard social norms as a subject of growing interest in the economic literature (e.g. game theoretical approaches based on ‘other‐regarding’ individual preferences, the analysis of the impact of rewards or punishment on individuals’ behaviour through experimental economics as well as field experiments, the revival of the institutionalist tradition spurred on by the influential work of Douglas North and followed by many others and the growing influence of neuroeconomics). In this paper, we focus on the relationship between incentives and social norms and survey the literature that could constitute the foundations of a motivation‐based economic analysis of social norms. Our main findings are that (1) the interaction between incentives and social norms is far from obvious since taking social norms into account involves the introduction of supplementary motives, in addition to self‐interest, into the economic analytical framework; (2) the analysis of the interaction between incentives and social norms resists an approach exclusively in terms of crowding‐in and ‐out effects because it is sensitive to whether it concerns behaviours driven by honour or by social stigma; (3) as a result, it is difficult to precisely evaluate the policy implication of the interactions between incentives and social norms.     

Career concerns incentives: An experimental test

Holmström’s [Holmström, B., 1982/1999. Managerial incentive problems: a dynamic perspective. Review of Economic Studies 66, 169–182. Originally published in: Essays in Economics and Management in Honour of Lars Wahlbeck, Helsinki] career concerns model has become a workhorse for analyzing agency issues in many fields. The underlying signal jamming argument requires players to use information in a Bayesian way, which is difficult to directly test with field data: typically little is known about the information that individuals base their decisions on. Our laboratory experiment provides prima facie evidence: (i) the signal jamming mechanism successfully creates incentives on the labor supply side; (ii) decision errors take time to decrease; (iii) while subjects’ average beliefs are remarkably consistent with play, a mild winner’s curse arises on the labor demand side.