The US Conservation Reserve Program: The evolution of an enrollment mechanism

By Daniel Hellerstein. 2017

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The United States Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) has evolved from near open enrollment, to competitive enrollment, and now to a mixture of competitive and targeted enrollment. This paper reviews the history of the CRP and the evolution of its enrollment mechanism. I discuss the use of bid caps and the Environmental Benefits Index bid ranking mechanism in the “general” CRP; and the use of highly targeted, but non-competitive, “continuous” CRP. Possible challenges of these designs are discussed, and alternative auction mechanisms are considered that could be more cost effective.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99a6ce7faecb459cd09df41b371e5432e64208ec