Economic Incentives to Conserve Wildlife on Private Lands: Analysis and Policy

Some believe that provision of private property rights in wildlife on private land provides a powerful economic incentive for nature conservation because it enables property owners to market such wildlife or its attributes. If such marketing is profitable, private landholders will conserve the wildlife concerned and its required habitat. But land is not always most profitably used for exploitation of wildlife, and many economic values of wildlife (such as non-use economic values) cannot be marketed. The mobility of some wildlife adds to the limitations of the private-property approach. While some species may be conserved by this approach, it is suboptimal as a single policy approach to nature conservation. Nevertheless, it is being experimented with, in the Northern Territory of Australia where landholders had a possibility of harvesting on their properties a quota of eggs and chicks of red-tailed black cockatoos for commercial sale. This scheme was expected to provide an incentive to private landholders to retain hollow trees essential for the nesting of these birds but failed. This case and others are analysed. Despite private-property failures, the long-term survival of some wildlife species depends on their ability to use private lands without severe harassment, either for their migration or to supplement their available resources, for example, the Asian elephant. Nature conservation on private land is often a useful, if not essential, supplement to conservation on public lands. Community and public incentives for such conservation are outlined.

Incentives and standards in agency contracts

This paper studies the structure of state-contingent contracts in the presence of moral hazard and multitasking. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the presence of multitasking to lead to fixed payments instead of incentive schemes are identified. It is shown that the primary determinant of whether multitasking leads to higher or lower powered incentives is the role that noncontractible outputs play in helping the agent deal with the production risk associated with the observable and contractible outputs. When the noncontractible outputs are risk substitutes and are socially undesirable, standards are never optimal. If the noncontractible outputs are socially desirable, standards are never optimal if the noncontractible outputs play a risk-complementary role.

The role of management incentives in successful information systems development and implementation

Because organizations are making large investments in Information systems (IS), efficient IS project management has been found critical to success. This study examines how the use of incentives can improve the project success. Agency theory is used to: identify motivational factors of project success, help the IS owners to understand to what extent management incentives can improve IS development and implementation (ISD/I). The outcomes will help practitioners and researchers to build on theoretical model of project management elements which lead to project success. Given the principal-agent nature of most significant scale of IS development, insights that will allow for greater alignment of the agent’s goals with those of the principal through incentive contracts, will serve to make ISD/I both more efficient and more effective, leading to more successful IS projects.