Valuing Pre-Commercial Genetic Resources: A Maximum Entropy Approach

Genetic improvement has been a major contributor to agricultural productivity in the United States, but many questions about the economics of crop breeding, such as the value of pre-commercial germplasm, remain unanswered. This study estimates the marginal value of poorly characterized materials contained in the U.S. national germplasm system. Within the search theoretic framework, we apply a maximum entropy method to estimate the probability and the expected level of improvement in pest susceptibility relative to its best previously observed level. The results indicate that the lower-bound estimate of benefit is significantly higher than the upper-bound cost of conserving an accession.