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Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors. Similarly, nature has evolved a diverse portfolio of species to maintain ecosystem function amid environmental fluctuations. In urban planning, public health, transport and communications, food production, and other domains, however, this feature often seems ignored. As we enter an era of unprecedented turbulence at the planetary level, we argue that ample responses to this new reality — that is, response diversity — can no longer be taken for granted and must be actively designed and managed. We describe here what response diversity is, how it is expressed and how it can be enhanced and lost.

Group incentives can and have been used to address a range of environmental and resource problems. These schemes base individual penalties and/or rewards on the performance of a group of individuals or firms who contribute to the environmental or resource problem. The economics literature on team incentives and public goods, as well as the literature specifically on environmental and natural resource management, provides insights into the design of group incentives. This article reviews the literature on group incentives in the context of environmental protection and natural resource policy. This literature suggests that group incentives can be effective and even efficient as environmental policy tools. However, the outcomes under group incentives will likely depend on a combination of the policy design and the nature of the internal group interactions. Within-group interactions are likely to be particularly important when policies involve thresholds so that coordination is needed to reach a cooperative equilibrium.

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital-equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth's current trajectory and support for actions that would foster more sustainable pathways suggests potential social tipping points in public demand for an earth stewardship vision. Here, we draw on empirical studies and theory to show that movement toward a stewardship vision can be facilitated by changes in either policy incentives or social norms. Our novel contribution is to point out that both norms and incentives must change and can do so interactively. This can be facilitated through leverage points and complementarities across policy areas, based on values, system design, and agency. Potential catalysts include novel democratic institutions and engagement of non-governmental actors, such as businesses, civic leaders, and social movements as agents for redistribution of power. Because no single intervention will transform the world, a key challenge is to align actions to be synergistic, persistent, and scalable.

Behavioral economics has highlighted the impact of various biases on economic outcomes. This essay reviews how biases have been incorporated into economic models of the law and the resulting implications for the assessment of different legal rules and policies. It focuses on two contexts. The first concerns biases that affect consumer purchases of risky products. Using a standard accident model that incorporates various forms of consumer bias, we discuss how bias can affect the efficient assignment of liability for product-related accidents. The second context concerns biases that affect the administration of law, particularly regarding the adjudication of guilt, the lawmaking function of trials, and criminal sentencing. We examine procedural rules like precedent and sentencing guidelines, both of which are aimed at curtailing judicial bias.

This paper extends the literature on products liability by considering the implications of temptation in a context where consumers have different susceptibilities to risk. In response to consumer heterogeneity, producers can offer multiple product varieties that vary according to their riskiness and price. However, when consumers exhibit price-based temptation, the price differential can tempt some consumers to purchase a less safe product variety even when that purchase decision might not be the rational choice given their specific risks. In resisting this temptation, they incur self-control costs. The role of temptation has been studied in other contexts, but its implications for the design of product liability rules have not previously been explored. We show that there is a trade-off between the desirability of sorting due to consumer heterogeneity and the allocative impacts from temptation. No liability leads to excessive risk taking by consumers (due to temptation), while full liability leads to excessive caution by consumers (because of the inability to sort). Thus, full liability is welfare-maximizing if temptation is sufficiently strong, but when temptation is low, increasing liability will have the opposite effect, leading to more purchases of the unsafe product and hence a decrease in overall safety and social welfare.

The increasing frequency of extreme events, exogenous and endogenous, poses challenges for our societies. The current pandemic is a case in point; but "once-in-a-century" weather events are also becoming more common, leading to erosion, wildfire and even volcanic events that change ecosystems and disturbance regimes, threaten the sustainability of our life-support systems, and challenge the robustness and resilience of societies. Dealing with extremes will require new approaches and large-scale collective action. Preemptive measures can increase general resilience, a first line of protection, while more specific reactive responses are developed. Preemptive measures also can minimize the negative effects of events that cannot be avoided. In this paper, we first explore approaches to prevention, mitigation and adaptation, drawing inspiration from how evolutionary challenges have made biological systems robust and resilient, and from the general theory of complex adaptive systems. We argue further that proactive steps that go beyond will be necessary to reduce unacceptable consequences.

Climate change is reshaping the comparative advantage of regions and hence driving migration flows, principally toward urban areas. Migration has multiple benefits and costs in both origin and destination regions. Coordinated policies that recognize how and why people move can reduce future costs and facilitate adaptation to climate change both within borders and internationally.

A number of issues arise when considering the positive and normative implications of local environmental policy making. This paper provides an overview of some of the issues and implications. These vary depending on whether local jurisdictions are charged with determining the stringency of policies or instead stringency is determined at a higher level of government and the local role focuses on implementation and the design of cost-effective measures for achieving the required goals. Key issues include both physical and economic spillovers across jurisdictions, and the extent to which stringency can be differentiated based on local conditions or preferences.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. New London (2005) justified the use of eminent domain for redevelopment takings based on the anticipated spillover benefits to the community in the form of increased taxes and new jobs. This paper asks whether this is a coherent economic rationale for allowing expropriation of residential land for private development. We show that, in the absence of a market distortion, the answer is generally no. However, when there is a pre-existing imperfection in the land and/or labor market, it is possible, though not guaranteed, that allowing eminent domain will increase social welfare. The reason, however, is not because of the increased tax revenue or employment per se, but rather because eminent domain increases industrial/commercial land use above the inefficiently low level that arises in the presence of the distortions. Thus, setting aside questions about fairness or holdouts, we show that whether using eminent domain for private takings can be justified on the basis of economic efficiency hinges on the existence of market distortions and the relative values of residential vs. industrial/commercial land in that particular market.

Policies to address environmental and natural resource management are often implemented at the group level. The defining feature of such policies is that penalties or rewards are based on g...

Voluntary environmental programs have the potential to impact not only participants but also nonparticipants, through, for example, the dissemination of information about abatement technolo...

Research in the field of environmental and natural resource economics has seen a very notable shift over the past several decades, with a diminished focus on theoretical analysis and a conc...

Sustainably managed wild fisheries support food and nutritional security, livelihoods, and cultures (1). Harmful fisheries subsidies—government payments that incentivize overcapacity and lead to overfishing—undermine these benefits yet are increasing globally (2). World Trade Organization (WTO) members have a unique opportunity at their ministerial meeting in November to reach an agreement that eliminates harmful subsidies (3). We—a group of scientists spanning 46 countries and 6 continents—urge the WTO to make this commitment...

The increasing frequency of extreme events, exogenous and endogenous, poses challenges for our societies. The current pandemic is a case in point; but "once-in-a-century" weather events are also becoming more common, leading to erosion, wildfire and even volcanic events that change ecosystems and disturbance regimes, threaten the sustainability of our life-support systems, and challenge the robustness and resilience of societies. Dealing with extremes will require new approaches and large-scale collective action. Preemptive measures can increase general resilience, a first line of protection, while more specific reactive responses are developed. Preemptive measures also can minimize the impacts of events that cannot be avoided. In this paper, we first explore approaches to prevention, mitigation and adaptation, drawing inspiration from how evolutionary challenges have made biological systems robust and resilient, and from the general theory of complex adaptive systems. We argue further that proactive steps that go beyond will be necessary to reduce unacceptable consequences.

Environmental and natural resource (ENR) policies that focus on group outcomes are common but have received relatively less attention from economists than policies based on individual behavior. Existing research tends to focus on particular contexts, such as water or air quality, fisheries, or land use. This paper discusses unifying themes of group performance policies, along with their advantages and disadvantages. We discuss a range of specific policy instruments, including group-based taxes, subsidies, and fixed penalties. We show how, in principle, group-based policies can be designed to achieve efficient provision of group-level environmental performance; however, in some cases, group policies can lead to suboptimal outcomes. We discuss the incentives for collaboration that can arise when regulators impose group performance policies, and the role that it can play in promoting efficient outcomes. We argue that the success of group-based policies will depend both on how the policy is designed (i.e., the external rewards and penalties) and on how the group operates. This implies potential complementarities between “top-down” regulatory interventions based on group performance and “bottom-up” within-group incentives for self-governance. Our discussion suggests that group performance policies should play a more prominent role in the suite of policy instruments considered by scholars and policymakers concerned with ENR management.

This paper reviews the literature relating to the use of regulatory threats to induce voluntary pollution abatement. Some scholars have argued that voluntary approaches are most likely to be effective when accompanied by a strong regulatory threat (e.g., Bizer, 1999; Coglianese and Nash, 2016; Khanna and Damon, 1999). However, the use of threats raises a number of issues that do not arise in other contexts where voluntary abatement occurs in response to market-based or government-provided financial incentives. This provides the rationale for this review focused specifically on voluntary approaches with regulatory threats, which discusses both the advantages and disadvantages of using a threat-based approach and the implications of doing so, drawing on both the theoretical and empirical literature.

This article uses a trip-level dataset to analyze the impact of a collective rights-based management system (“sectors”) introduced in the New England groundfish fishery in 2010. We examine ...

A better understanding of the link between a firm’s financial status and its regulated performance can help to improve the design of regulatory regimes and lead to more efficient regulatory structures. To date, however, the literature investigating this link has not considered the role that regulatory enforcement plays in determining how financial status affects performance. This paper analyzes how regulatory enforcement affects the relationship between financial status and the safety performance of regulated firms. It examines a particular form of safety performance, namely, the environmental performance of companies regulated under environmental protection laws. In particular, our study explores this effect in the context of the regulation of water pollution using data on wastewater discharges from U.S. chemical manufacturing facilities for the years 1995 to 2001. The results suggest that enforcement in general can play an important role in shaping the effects of financial status on safety performance.

Land use/cover change (LUCC) is a major threat to ecosystems. It may affect the abundance and distribution of species. Despite the importance of LUCC to ecological patterns and processes, few quant...

Marine hypoxia adversely affects parts of numerous waterbodies around the world. The effects extend to marine organisms. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we present a theoretical model that can be used to analyze the spatial effects of hypoxia on harvest for any fishing industry. Second, we use temporally and spatially differentiated harvest data for Connecticut Long Island Sound lobster industry to estimate the contemporaneous and lagged effects of hypoxia on harvest across three adjacent fishing zones, only one of which faces moderate to severe hypoxic conditions each summer. The key insight from the theoretical model shows that hypoxia can affect the optimal harvest of both the hypoxic and non-hypoxic fishing zones, and that the impact outside the hypoxic zone will vary across species, depending on how the species responds. Results from the empirical model are consistent with the theoretical findings, i.e., the presence of hypoxic water conditions reduced harvest from both the hypoxic and non-hypoxic water zones during the period between 1995 and 2011.

The development of mineral resources in the deep sea can potentially generate significant economic returns, but also raises governance challenges. The International Seabed Authority (isa) wrestles with a wide range of issues and complex interactions that may affect not only how the industry develops over time, but also how development will benefit mankind. Two key issues they face are the means for sharing the payments from deep sea mining (dsm), and protecting environmental resources in the deep sea from harmful effects. This article provides an overview of issues for deciding among alternative means of distributing the isa’s share of monetary returns that will be realized as deep sea mineral resources, how they are converted from natural assets into financial assets, and alternative approaches to ensure that exploitation of these resources does not come at the expense of mankind also benefiting from the environmental resources provided by the deep sea.

This paper evaluates the welfare consequences of the proposed use of eminent domain to forcibly refinance “underwater” mortgages (mortgages for which the remaining loan balance exceeds the value of the house). Our results show that, in the absence of transaction costs, the policy unambiguously increases welfare, regardless of the amount of compensation paid to lenders. However, when takings generate transaction costs, we show that in a competitive mortgage market where borrowers fully finance the needed compensation through lump sum taxes, welfare is decreasing in transaction costs, but more generous compensation for lenders may either increase or decrease social welfare.

In July 2015, the Council of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) adopted seven priority deliverables for the development of the exploitation code. The first priority was the development of a zero draft of the exploitation regulations. This article focusses on the second priority deliverable, namely the development of a payment mechanism for exploitation activities, following detailed financial and economic models based on proposed business plans. Between 2015 and 2017, five workshops have been organised with 196 active participants from 34 countries. The results so far are synthesised, drawing upon the outcome of these workshops, ISA technical papers, and the scholarly literature. Van Nijen, K (reprint author), Univ Antwerp, Fac Business & Econ, Dept Engn Management, B-2000 Antwerp, Belgium, Global Sea Mineral Resources NV, B-8400 Oostende, Belgium. kris.vannijen@uantwerpen.be

Stated preference scenarios often describe outcomes to be valued in terms of intermediate biophysical processes or ecosystem services with indirect utility effects, rather than in terms of final, directly welfare‐relevant consequences. This article evaluates whether valid welfare estimates can emerge from this practice. We begin with a theoretical model demonstrating conditions under which stated preference scenarios that include intermediate outcomes will elicit welfare estimates identical to those from parallel scenarios that include associated final outcomes (i.e., convergent validity will hold). The model demonstrates that a necessary condition for convergent validity is the ability of respondents to correctly predict biophysical production functions linking intermediate to final outcomes. Hypotheses from the theoretical model are then evaluated empirically using an application of choice experiments to migratory fish restoration in the U.S. state of Rhode Island. Empirical results are mixed but generally reject convergent validity; welfare estimates are not robust to the use of an intermediate outcome in lieu of a related final outcome in stated preference scenarios, as predicted by theory. Results of the analysis suggest that greater attention should be given to the reliability of welfare estimation when final outcomes cannot be quantified.

This article presents an economic model of the efficiency and industry impacts of individual vs. collective approaches to rights-based management in fisheries. Key features of the model are the inclusion of uncertainty and an optimally designed mechanism for paying penalties or buying additional quota when harvests exceed allowances. Contrary to what might be expected, we find that a risk pooling mechanism (through either collective quotas or ITQs) does not necessarily reduce the probability of quota overages. We also show that for arbitrary penalties, the incentive effects faced by harvesters differ under the various approaches. The ability of regulators to optimally adjust the enforcement mechanism (here the quota price) plays a critical role in determining the efficiency of the different approaches. Finally, the optimal quota prices and the conditions that trigger them differ across the approaches; hence the impacts on expected profits differ as well.

A central challenge in the Mississippi River Basin is how to continue to support profitable agricultural production, provide water supply, flood control, transportation, and other benefits, while reducing the current burden of environmental degradation. Several practices have been shown to reduce nutrient runoff and water pollution, and improve soil fertility, while often yielding profits for farmers. Yet many of these beneficial practices remain underutilized. Participants at an expert workshop identified five candidate financial mechanisms that could increase adoption of these beneficial farming practices in four focal Midwest states in the next five years: crop insurance premium subsidies, transformation of the private service provider business model, expansion and targeting of 2019 U.S. Farm Bill funding, development of new state funds, and direction of post-disaster federal funds towards habitat restoration, particularly in floodplains. This study provides rough approximations of the change in nutrient runoff and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the annualized costs, and the nutrient and GHG reductions per dollar likely to result from deployment of each financial mechanism. Based upon these approximations, the adoption of these programs could reduce annual nitrate flows at the outlet of the Ohio and Upper Mississippi River Basins by 25%, surpassing the intermediate 2025 target (20% reduction) and achieving more than half of the long-term target (45% reduction) set by the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force. These approximations also illustrate that these five mechanisms could provide the same GHG reductions (∼43 Tg CO2e yr−1) as taking 12 coal-fired energy plants offline. The total cost of these five financial mechanisms is estimated at ∼$2.6 billion, or 64 g of nitrates and ∼17 kg of CO2e per dollar spent. These proposed solutions all face political, financial, cultural or institutional challenges, but with industry support, creative political action, and continued communication of both private and public benefits, they can create meaningful nutrient reductions and rebuild soils by 2022.

Part 1 Theory: the role of liability - property rules, liability rules and alienability - one view of the cathedral, Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed, liability for harm versus regulation of safety, Steven Shavell, a comparison of taxes, regulation and liability rules under imperfect information, Michele J. White, a model of the optimal use of liability and safety regulation, Steven Shavell incentive effects of liability - strict liability vs. negligence, Steven Shavell, strict liability vs. negligence in a market setting, A. Mitchell Polinsky, when does the rule of liability matter?, Harold Demsetz, strict liability in a principal-agent model, Harry A. Newman and David W. Wright, on liability and insurance, Steven Shavell, the influence of litigation costs on deterrence under strict liability and negligence, Keith N. Hylton, bankruptcy and care choice, T.R. Beard, tort law as a regulatory regime for catastrophic personal injuries, William Landes and Richard Posner. Part 2 Applications: conceptual models - the effects of environmental liability on industrial real estate development, James Boyd et al, lender penalty for environmental damage and the equilibrium cost of capital, Anthony Heyes, sharing damages among multiple tortfeasors, Lewis A. Kornhauser and Richard L. Pevesz, indivisible toxic torts - the economics of joint and several liability, Tom H. Tietenberg, liability for groundwater contamination from pesticides, Kathleen Segerson, the structure of penalties in environmental enforcement - an economic analysis, Kathleen Segerson and Tom Tietenberg empirical models -controlling stochastic pollution events through liability rules -some evidence from OCS leasing, James J. Opaluch and Thomas A. Grigalunas, premiums for environmental liability - does superfund increase the cost of capital?, Steven Garber and James K. Hammitt, strict liability as a deterrent in toxic waste management -empirical evidence from accident and spill data, Anna Alberini and David Austin, liability and large-scale, long-term hazards, A.H. Ringleb and Steven N. Wiggins liability reform - environmental liability reform and privatization in central and eastern Europe, James Boyd, economic models of compensation for damage caused by nuclear accidents - some lessons for the revision of the Paris and Vienna Conventions, Michael Faure.

Nonmarket valuation, i.e., valuing environmental goods and services that are not traded in a market, has been increasingly used in a variety of policy and decision-making contexts. This is one (but not the only) way that researchers and practitioners have sought to define and measure the values that individuals assign to environmental goods and services. The idea of putting a dollar value on protecting the environment has been controversial, but often because the economic approach to valuation has not been well-understood. This chapter provides a nontechnical overview of and rationale for the economic approach to valuation, starting from a broad conceptualization of values versus valuation. It summarizes the economic concept of value and its key features. It then discusses the use of economic valuation in decision making, followed by an overview of the steps involved in the valuation process and important issues that arise in implementing that process. Finally, it identifies and briefly summarizes the principal non-market valuation methods used by economists. In doing so, it sets the stage for the more detailed chapters on theory and methods that follow.

I. INTRODUCTION A large literature has developed to explore the unique aspects of accidents involving consumer products when the victim is also the purchaser. (1) The main difference between these product-related accidents and accidents in which the injurer and victim are "strangers" is that the amount consumers are willing to pay for a risky product will reflect the amount of harm they expect to incur in the event of an accident. This expectation will depend on two factors: the applicable liability rule for assigning accident damages and the accuracy of consumers' perception of the risk of an accident. Two results are well known in this context. First, when consumers correctly perceive the risk of a product-related accident, the outcome will be efficient regardless of the liability rule. This is essentially a consequence of the Coase Theorem (Coase 1960), given that any assignment of liability imposed by the law will be perfectly reflected by appropriate shifts in the demand and supply curves for the product. As a result, firms will choose optimal product safety, and consumers will purchase the efficient amount of the product. Second, when consumers misperceive risk, only strict liability is efficient because firms (which are assumed to perceive risks accurately) will set a price that correctly conveys product risk to consumers, so they will purchase the correct amount, and firms, because they bear the full damages from any accidents, will invest in efficient safety. This article extends this literature by considering situations where consumers have private information, prior to purchase, about their differing susceptibilities to product-related harm. This is descriptive of many types of potentially harmful products, such as when consumers may have allergies to certain foods, or when they may suffer side effects from certain drugs. In addition, proper use of certain products requires a minimum level of physical strength and/or know-how, as in the case of power tools (like chain saws) or heavy machinery. In all of these cases, it is desirable for consumers to self-select in their purchases decision, with those who lack the necessary capability or who are especially prone to harm refraining from purchase. A crucial factor in achieving this outcome, however, is that consumers must expect to bear their own harm, given that producers cannot identify consumer types prior to purchase. Thus, even with accurate consumer perceptions, the various liability rules are no longer equally efficient (in particular, strict liability no longer leads to efficient purchase decisions). When consumers also misperceive risk, the problem becomes even more complicated because, while efficient self-selection requires consumers to bear their own harm, accurate signaling of risk requires that firms bear full liability (assuming that firms have better information about product risk than consumers). A trade-off therefore emerges between imposing liability on firms versus consumers. The purpose of this article is to characterize the choice among the various liability rules (no liability, strict liability, and negligence) in the presence of this trade-off. The general results can be summarized as follows. When all consumers suffer the same harm and perceive risk accurately, all of the liability rules are efficient, but when consumers misperceive risk, only strict liability remains efficient. When consumers suffer varying harm and perceive risk accurately, negligence and no liability are efficient, but strict liability is not. However, when consumers misperceive risk, none of the liability rules is efficient. In this case, the preferred rule depends on the degree of misperceptions: specifically, when consumers perceive risk fairly accurately, negligence is optimal, but when they perceive risk very inaccurately, strict liability is optimal. The remainder of the article is organized as follows. Section II lays out the model and briefly summarizes the benchmark case where all consumers suffer the same harm. …

The economic models that prescribe Pigovian taxation as the first-best means of reducing energy-related externalities are typically based on the neoclassical model of rational consumer choice. Yet, consumer behavior in markets for energy-using durables is generally thought to be far from efficient, giving rise to the concept of the “energy-efficiency gap.” This paper presents a welfare analysis of energy policies that is based on a behavioral model of temptation and self-control, introduced by Gul and Pesendorfer [23] , [24] . We find that, in the presence of temptation, (i) Pigovian taxes alone do not yield a first-best outcome, (ii) when viewed as substitutes, energy efficiency standards can dominate Pigovian taxes, and (iii) a policy combining standards with a Pigovian tax can yield higher social welfare than a Pigovian tax alone, implying that the two instruments should be viewed as complements rather than substitutes.

Policy makers around the world seem to have widely endorsed the use of voluntary approaches as a means to address concerns about environmental protection and resource degradation. Voluntary approaches have been adopted in many developed countries, as well as in a number of developing countries. However, economists have not uniformly endorsed this policy approach. The economic literature suggests that in some contexts voluntary approaches can be effective if carefully designed but are not likely to be effective otherwise. This article provides an overview of the economics of voluntary approaches, with a particular focus on issues related to design. It seeks to highlight the features that are important determinants of both their success in improving environmental outcomes and their efficiency. Although the discussion focuses on environmental protection, it is also relevant in other contexts such as conservation and fisheries management.

Stated preference scenarios often provide information on intermediate biophysical processes but omit information on the resulting final services that provide utility. This may cause respondents to speculate about the effects of intermediate outcomes on their welfare, leading to biased welfare estimates. This work clarifies distinctions between intermediate and final ecosystem services within stated preference valuation and develops a structural model by which to infer respondents' speculations when a final ecosystem service is omitted. The model also derives implications for welfare estimates. Methods and results are illustrated using an application of choice experiments to fish restoration in Rhode Island's Pawtuxet watershed.Key Words: choice experiment, choice modeling, ecosystem service, river restoration, valuation, willingness to pay(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Studies often apply stated preference valuation to quantify willingness to pay (WTP] for changes in the quantity or quality of ecosystem goods and services (henceforth, "services"]. Consistent estimates of these values require careful definition of the services under consideration and how those services contribute to human welfare. Within ecosystem service analyses, final ecosystem services may be defined as ecosystem outputs that directly enhance respondents' utility. Intermediate ecosystem services may be viewed as inputs into the biophysical production of final services (Boyd and Krupnick 2009, Brown, Bergstrom, and Loomis 2007, Fisher et al. 2008, Fisher, Turner, and Morling 2009, Wallace 2007], That is, intermediate services provide benefits through their effect on final goods and services that are valued directly by people (Johnston and Russell 2011], A common example of an intermediate service is water purification or nutrient cycling in riparian buffers. Water purification, as it relates to a nutrient like nitrogen, is accomplished through intermediate ecological processes that generally benefit humans only through their contribution to the final, directly valued services (e.g., clean drinking water or surface waters that are valued for recreational or aesthetic purposes]. Lack of attention to the distinction between intermediate and final services can lead to welfare estimates that omit, double count, or misrepresent the contributions of those services to utility. Many ecosystem processes provide both intermediate and final services, further complicating welfare analysis.In the following case study, multiple ecosystem services are influenced by restoration of passage for migratory fish such as alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus] and blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis] in Rhode Island's rivers. Many of these services influence public welfare directly. An example is the abundance of fish- dependent wildlife such as otters and osprey (Johnston et al. 2012], Some of these services simultaneously influence, or provide intermediate effects on, other final services. For example, fish and wildlife abundance influences overall ecosystem condition or naturalness, which is also valued by Rhode Island residents as a final service (largely due to nonuse motivations].1 Still other services influence welfare only through intermediate channels. For example, restoration affects the mussel species Anodonta implicate, which relies on migratory fish to carry its larvae. While not valued directly by the public, a healthy Anodonta implicate population influences overall ecosystem condition (Johnston et al. 2011, 2012], These examples illustrate three ways that individual ecosystem services can influence welfare: (i] directly as a final service, (ii] both directly as a final service and indirectly as an intermediate service, or (iii] only as an intermediate service.Despite the importance of these distinctions for welfare estimation, surveys in the stated preference literature have rarely clarified the difference between intermediate and final services. …

Voluntary approaches have been used in a variety of contexts and for a variety of purposes in agriculture, including voluntary conservation programs and product labeling. This paper provides an overview of some of the general principles that emerge from the literature on voluntary approaches and their application in agriculture. The literature suggests that, to be effective, voluntary approaches must provide sufficiently strong participation incentives to a targeted population, clearly identify standards for behavior or performance that ensure additionality and avoid slippage, and monitor outcomes. Thus, reliance on voluntary approaches in agriculture is likely to be effective only if there is sufficient market demand for certain product characteristics, significant public funds are committed to pay for voluntary actions, or the political will exists to impose regulations if voluntary approaches fail. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.