Abstract
Private efforts to prevent and control biological pests and infectious diseases can be a public good, and so incentivising private biosecurity management actions is both desirable and problematic. Compensation contracts can encourage biosecurity efforts, provide support against the collapse of economic sectors, and create an insurance network. We conceptualise a novel biosecurity instrument relying on formal compensation private–public partnerships using contract theory. Our framework explains how the public sector can harness increased private biosecurity measures by making payments to agents which depend both on their performance and that of the other stakeholders. Doing so allows the government to spread the risk across signatory agents. The framework also improves our understanding of government involvement due to public effects of biosecurity, influenced by the private agents’ capacity to derive private benefit from their own efforts on monitoring and control. Lastly, these theoretical results provide a foundation for further study of contractual responsibility sharing for pest management.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 771-788 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Journal of Agricultural Economics |
| Volume | 70 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 19 Dec 2018 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 9 Aug 2019 |
Bibliographical note
© 2018 The Agricultural Economics Society. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy.Keywords
- Compensation payments
- contract theory
- plant and tree health
- public–private partnerships
- risk sharing