The present paper proposes that markets for nature conservation on private land are missing because of the problem of asymmetric information. An auction of conservation contracts was designed to reveal hidden information needed to facilitate meaningful transactions between landholders and government. The present paper describes the key elements of auction and contract design employed and the results obtained from a pilot auction of conservation contracts run in two regions of Victoria. The pilot demonstrated that it was possible to create at least the supply side of a market for nature conservation and in conjunction with a defined budget, prices were discovered and resources allocated through contracts with landholders. The present paper compares a discriminative price auction with a hypothetical fixed-price scheme showing that an auction could offer large cost savings to governments interested in nature conservation on private land. The paper identifies some important design problems that would need to be solved before auctions could be applied more broadly including: multiple complementary outcomes, reserve prices, sequential auction design and contract design. Nevertheless, the paper does show that auctioning conservation contracts for environmental outcomes is an important new policy mechanism that deserves closer examination.

This article reports on an Australian auction to procure multiple environmental outcomes: "EcoTender". EcoTender uses a Catchment Modelling Framework (CMF) to estimate the impact landholder actions have on carbon, terrestrial biodiversity, aquatic function (water quality and quantity), and saline land area. This framework solves the problem of linking paddock-scale land use and management to catchment-scale environmental outcomes. This is the first time a market-based instrument has been fully integrated from desk to field with a biophysical model for the purchase of multiple environmental outcomes. A multiple outcome auction provides several new economic and scientific challenges. This article discusses the EcoTender approach to incorporating agency preferences, modeling the joint production of environmental outcomes and reporting environmental scores. Results indicate that linking EcoTender to the carbon market reduced the cost of procuring the environmental goods by 26%. Further, preliminary estimates show that the environmental gains from scoring the joint production of multiple outcomes are between 30% and 50% to the agency. Copyright 2007 International Association of Agricultural Economists.

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Most economic assessments conclude there is no economic efficiency case for governments to provide drought assistance. However, significant public funds are allocated to farmers during droughts and there is a second-best case to improve drought policy design. In this article we show that the National Drought Policy suffers from adverse selection, moral hazard, incentive compatibility and government commitment problems. We use ABARE farm-level data that suggest that at least adverse selection was a problem in Victoria during the 2002-03 drought. These results are replicated at the national level. The current approach of the Commonwealth and state governments is ineffective because it is very difficult to design an efficient and fair drought policy that relies on ex post revelation of information. An alternative approach is investigated where incentives are designed so that farmers self-select into one of a number of drought policy agreements consistent with their capacity to prepare for drought.

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