Lata Gangadharan

A laboratory study of auctions for reducing non-point source pollution

Abstract Non-point source pollution, such as nutrient runoff to waterways from agricultural production, is an environmental problem that typically involves asymmetric information. Land use changes to reduce pollution incur opportunity costs that are privately known to landholders, but these changes provide environmental benefits that may be more accurately estimated by regulators. This paper reports a testbed laboratory experiment in which landholder/sellers in sealed-offer auctions compete to obtain part of a fixed budget allocated by the regulator to subsidize abatement. In one treatment the regulator reveals to landholders the environmental benefits estimated for their projects, and in another treatment the regulator conceals the potential projects’ “environmental quality.” The results show that sellers’ offers misrepresent their costs more for high-quality projects when quality is revealed, so total abatement is lower and seller profits are higher when landholders know their projects’ environmental benefits. This suggests that concealing this information may improve regulatory efficiency.

Interrelationships between Income, Health and the Environment: Extending the Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis

This study examines the link between the health indicators and the environmental variables for a cross-section of countries widely dispersed in the economic development spectrum. While the environment and income are seen to have an inverted U-shaped relationship (Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis), it is also well established that health and environment are positively related. Our study focuses on the implications of this for the relationship between health and income. In the early phases of income growth, the gains in health and the losses in environmental quality could cancel each other out and this challenges the idea that as incomes increase health would always improve. To empirically analyse these issues, we estimate a two-stage least squares model that focuses on the impact of income and the environment on health status, with environment being an endogenous variable. Our results show that the environmental stress variable has a significant negative effect on health status. At the same time, GNP levels and improvements in access to better sanitation and safe water are shown to vary positively with health status variables. We find that the health gains obtained through improved incomes can be negated to a significant extent if the indirect effect of income acting via the environment is ignored. Research findings in this regard would be a useful policy instrument towards maximising both the environmental and health gains that come with economic growth and development.

A Laboratory Comparison of Uniform and Discriminative Price Auctions for Reducing Non-point Source Pollution

Auctions allow regulators to identify land management changes with substantial environmental benefit and low opportunity cost. This paper reports an experiment in which seller subjects compete in sealed-offer auctions to obtain part of a fixed budget allocated by the experimenter-regulator to subsidize pollution abatement. One treatment employs uniform-price auction rules, whereas another treatment employs discriminative price auction rules. We find that most offers in the uniform-price auction are within 2% of cost, whereas most offers in the discriminative price auction are at least 8% greater than cost. Nevertheless, the discriminative-price auction has superior overall market performance. (JEL C91, Q15)

Letting the Briber Go Free: An Experiment on Mitigating Harassment Bribes

This paper examines the effectiveness of using asymmetric liability to combat harassment bribes. Basu (2011) advocates legal immunity for bribe-givers, while retaining culpability for bribe-takers. Results from our experiment indicate that while this policy has the potential to significantly reduce corrupt practices, weak economic incentives for the bribe-giver, or retaliation by bribe-takers can mitigate the positive disciplining effect of such an implementation. As a result, asymmetric liability on its own may face challenges in the field.

Market power in tradable emission markets: a laboratory testbed for emission trading in Port Phillip Bay, Victoria

In theory, competitive emission permit markets minimise total abatement cost for any emission ceiling. Permit markets are often imperfectly competitive, however, if they are thin and dominated by large firms. The dominant firm(s) could exercise market power and increase other firms’ costs of pollution control, while reducing their own emission control costs. This paper reports a testbed laboratory experiment to examine whether a dominant firm can exercise market power in a permit market organised using the double auction trading institution. Our parameters approximate the abatement costs of sources in a proposed tradable emissions market for the reduction of nitrogen in the Port Phillip Watershed in Victoria, Australia. We vary across treatments the initial (pre-trade) allocation of permits to sources, so that in one treatment the seller of permits is a monopolist and in another treatment the selling side of the market is duopolistic. We also vary the information that subjects have about the number and abatement costs of their competitors. We find that prices and seller profits are higher and efficiency is lower on average in the monopoly sessions compared to the duopoly sessions, but the differences are not substantial and are not statistically significant due to pronounced variation across sessions. Moreover, prices, profits and transaction volumes are usually much closer to the competitive equilibrium than the monopoly equilibrium.

An Experimental Study of Electronic Bulletin Board Trading for Emission Permits

This paper reports a laboratory experiment that studies several features of a tradable emission permit program recently implemented in the Los Angeles area. The experiment focuses on the new Electronic Bulletin Board trading institution, in which firms publicly post proposed terms of trade. Potential trading partners can review this information online, and transactions are executed following bilateral negotiation. The experiment includes trading restrictions implemented in the regulations due to the geography of Los Angeles. We find that the bulletin board market performs well and that prices reflect market conditions as accurately as in the continuous double auction trading institution.

Cooperation Spillovers and Price Competition in Experimental Markets

Firms often cooperate explicitly through activities such as research joint ventures, while competing in other markets. Cooperation in research and development can allow firms to internalize the external benefits of knowledge creation and increase the returns from research and development (R&D) expenditures. Such cooperation may spill over to facilitate collusion in the market, however, potentially lowering welfare and efficiency. This paper uses a laboratory experiment to examine if sellers successfully coordinate to fund a joint research project to reduce their costs, and how this collaboration affects their pricing behavior. The experiment includes control treatments with separate R&D cooperation and markets. Our results show that although participants usually cooperate when given an opportunity, cooperation is observed less frequently when they also compete in the market. Communication improves cooperation in all environments, particularly when the market is present. Nevertheless, the data provide no evidence of seller collusion in the market.

Environmental Markets: What Do We Learn from the Lab?

In recent years, some of the most influential policies have been either tested or evaluated using experimental methods. Experiments have provided significant insights on the implications of different designs on market outcomes and the lessons learned have helped improve academic debate and the interaction between policy makers and researchers. In this paper, we provide an overview of experiments relating to environmental markets. Expenditure on environmental programs has been growing in importance yet it is controversial in current times due to the fiscal cuts around the world. Finding cost-effective ways of reaching environmental goals is thus an objective of most governments. Research using experiments can help isolate how individuals and regulators would respond to incentives and therefore identify the most effective programs.

Do Attitudes Towards Corruption Differ Across Cultures? Experimental Evidence from Australia, India, Indonesia andSingapore

This paper examines cultural differences in attitudes towards corruption by analysing individual-decision making in a corrupt experimental environment. Attitudes towards corruption play a critical role in the persistence of corruption. Our experiments differentiate between the incentives to engage in corrupt behaviour and the incentives to punish corrupt behaviour and allow us to explore whether, in environments characterized by lower levels of corruption, there is both a lower propensity to engage in corrupt behaviour and a higher propensity to punish corrupt behaviour. Based on experiments run in Australia (Melbourne), India (Delhi), Indonesia (Jakarta) and Singapore, we find that there is more variation in the propensities to punish corrupt behaviour than in the propensities to engage in corrupt behaviour across cultures. The results reveal that the subjects in India exhibit a higher tolerance towards corruption than the subjects in Australia while the subjects in Indonesia behave similarly to those in Australia. The subjects in Singapore have a higher propensity to engage in corruption than the subjects in Australia. We also vary our experimental design to examine the impact of a more effective punishment system and the effect of the perceived cost of bribery.

Do Security-Differentiated Water Rights Improve the Performance of Water Markets?

Most existing water markets combine water rights trading and water allocation trading. Offering security-differentiated water rights can make the market more efficient and allow water users to manage the risks of supply uncertainty better. We conduct a laboratory experiment which compares two designs for water rights; one with a single security level and another with two security levels. We find that a two security level system increases overall profits when transactions costs are lower on the water rights market than on the water allocation market. It also improves risk allocation by allowing subjects to trade-off profits variability against expected profits according to their risk type and this result is robust to the existence of transactions costs on either market. Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.