ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION AND THE PRICING OF NATURAL RESOURCES: THE CASE OF UNMETERED WATER; Proceedings of the Fifth Joint Conference on Agriculture, Food, and the Environment, June 17-18, 1996, Padova, Italy
1996
Smith, Rodney B.W. | Tsur, Yacov
This paper uses mechanism design theory to (i) propose a mechanism to price irrigation water when farmers are heterogeneous in their production technologies (adverse selection) and their individual water uses are unobserved (moral hazard) and (ii) discusses briefly when such a mechanism might be economically unreasonable. Unmetered irrigation water is often priced by imposing per-acre fees on cultivated acreage or by charging per-unit fees on observable inputs or outputs. The offered pricing procedure is based on the observed output and achieves a first-best outcome when implementation is free of transaction costs.
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