Florian Hartig Theoretical Ecology & Ecological Data Science

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Stay by thy neighbor? Social organization determines the efficiency of biodiversity markets with spatial incentives

Florian Hartig, Martin Drechsler

Ecological Complexity, 7(1), 91–99 (2010)
Cite this
@article{hartig2010stay,
  author = {Florian Hartig and Martin Drechsler},
  title = {Stay by thy neighbor? Social organization determines the efficiency of biodiversity markets with spatial incentives},
  journal = {Ecological Complexity},
  volume = {7},
  number = {1},
  pages = {91–99},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.1016/j.ecocom.2009.07.001},
}

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecocom.2009.07.001
Cited by 24 (Google Scholar) · 40 (OpenAlex), as of 07 September 2026

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Abstract

Market-based conservation instruments, such as payments, auctions or tradable permits, are environmental policies that create financial incentives for landowners to engage in voluntary conservation on their land. But what if ecological processes operate across property boundaries and land use decisions on one property influence ecosystem functions on neighboring sites? This paper examines how to account for such spatial externalities when designing market-based conservation instruments. We use an agent-based model to analyze different spatial metrics and their implications on land use decisions in a dynamic cost environment. The model contains a number of alternative submodels which differ in incentive design and social interactions of agents, the latter including coordinating as well as cooperating behavior of agents. We find that incentive design and social interactions have a strong influence on the spatial allocation and the costs of the conservation market.

What the paper shows and why it matters (AI-generated)

Market-based conservation instruments assume landowners act independently, but ecological processes routinely cross property lines, so one owner's land-use decision can affect a neighbor's outcomes. This agent-based model shows that how landowners are socially organised, whether they coordinate, cooperate, or act alone, has as much influence on a spatially explicit biodiversity market's efficiency as the financial incentive design itself. The social-organisation angle has stayed a live thread in later work on spatial coordination incentives and conservation auction design.