The agglomeration bonus (AB) has been advocated as an incentive mechanism to boost spatially coordinated conservation efforts, where such coordination is thought to be beneficial to achieving biodiversity or other ecological outcomes. Specifically, an AB is paid to individual landholders if their conserved habitats are spatially connected to the conserved habitats of adjacent neighbours. This paper employs a series of controlled lab experiments with agriculture students to investigate the performance of AB in budget‐constrained discriminatory‐price auctions across different landscape types. We focus on the spatial correlation of opportunity costs and environmental benefits as one potentially important aspect of the landscape. We set up a stylised agricultural landscape where the conservation agency aims to connect fragmented wildlife habitats by incentivising farmers to enrol land in a conservation programme. We investigate the effects of an AB in landscapes where opportunity costs and environmental benefits are uncorrelated, negatively correlated or positively correlated over space. We found that the benefits of an AB in improving landscape‐scale environmental outcomes were significant in the positive correlation landscape. However, the AB resulted in worse outcomes in the uncorrelated and negative landscapes.

中文翻译：

---

保护拍卖中聚集奖金表现的景观层面决定因素

集聚红利（AB）被提倡作为一种激励机制，以促进空间协调的保护工作，这种协调被认为有利于实现生物多样性或其他生态成果。具体来说，如果个体土地所有者的受保护栖息地在空间上与邻近邻居的受保护栖息地相连，则向其支付 AB。本文采用了一系列针对农业学生的受控实验室实验来研究 AB 在不同景观类型的预算受限的歧视性价格拍卖中的表现。我们关注机会成本和环境效益的空间相关性，将其作为景观的潜在重要方面之一。我们建立了一个风格化的农业景观，保护机构旨在通过激励农民将土地纳入保护计划来连接分散的野生动物栖息地。我们研究了 AB 在机会成本和环境效益在空间上不相关、负相关或正相关的景观中的影响。我们发现，AB 在改善景观规模环境结果方面的好处在正相关景观中非常显着。然而，AB 在不相关和负面的情况下导致了更糟糕的结果。