Private eradication of mobile public bads

Abstract

We consider analytically the non-cooperative behavior of many private property owners who each controls the stock of a public bad such as an invasive weed species, infectious disease, fire, or agricultural pest. The stock of the public bad can grow and disperse across a spatial domain of arbitrary size. In this setting, we characterize the conditions under which private property owners will control or eradicate, and determine how this decision depends on property-specific environmental features and on the behavior of other landowners. We show that high mobility or lower control by others result in lower private control. But when the marginal dynamic cost of the bad is sufficiently large, we find that complete eradication may be privately optimal (despite the lack of consideration of others’ welfare) – in these cases, eradication arises in the non-cooperative game and is also socially optimal so there is, in effect, no externality. Finally, when property harboring the bad is not owned, or is owned in common, we derive the side payments required to efficiently control the mobile public bad

Identifying the landscape drivers of agricultural insecticide use leveraging evidence from 100,000 fields

“…Nevertheless, we test models with crop-by-year dummy variables as well as individual crop models that account for cropspecific year shocks. If pests spill over between fields, the benefit of pest control decreases as fields become smaller because an individual farmer has less control over the pest population spilling over into her field (31). Similarly, we would anticipate that the benefit of pest control would increase with the more fields that an owner held in proximity because she would retain more of the value of her pest control action.…”

“…However, from an economic or human behavior perspective, there are important underlying differences between large expanses of the same crop under multiple owners compared with a single owner. For example, if pests are mobile and the population is shared between more than one farm, farmers may be more willing to spray on large fields because the influence of surrounding growers' management decisions would be reduced (31). Thus, for a given pest distribution across space, the underlying spatial configuration of field size and ownership may be an important and understudied factor for how pests translate into pesticide use.…”

A Cost–Benefit Approach for Prioritizing Invasive Species

“…Chades et al (2011);Epanchin-Niell and Wilen (2012); Chalak et al (2016) and Costello et al (2017). Many papers also focus on optimal surveillance and detection strategies to limit the spread of a single invasive species with papers including Hauser and McCarthy (2009);McCarthy et al (2008); Epanchin-Niell et al (2014) and Holden et al (2016).…”

Social-institutional problem dimensions of late blight and bacterial wilt of potato in Ethiopia : The contribution of social learning and communicative interventions to collective action

“…In the context of collective action problems, a communicative intervention can be designed around the provision of information with the aim of explicating the ecological features of the disease management problem that makes individuals interdependent (Peng et al, 2018;Ostrom, 1999). Costello et al (2017) argued that knowing the spatial connectivity induced by the mobility of public bad resources influences private decisions, which collectively can have important consequences for control across a spatial domain. In our study context farmers have very limited knowledge of the spreading feature of the late-blight pathogen and the collective risk and benefit of individual management decisions (Damtew et al, 2020;.…”

“…Because of this characteristic of the disease and its causing agent, the management of late blight is regarded as one among specific types of collective action problems in the domain of 'public bads' (e.g. infectious and invasive species, microbial resistance to antimicrobial agents, global warming, air pollution) (Costello et al, 2017).…”