MARKET MECHANISMS TO ALLOCATE HERITAGE CONSERVATION FUND: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Abstract

The under-provision of efforts in built heritage conservation was due to market failure to allocate cost and benefit efficiently. Conservation agency could facilitate conservation effort, which was considered not beneficial from the point of view of the private owners of the heritage houses, by providing conservation subsidy. In this paper, we conducted three different experimental auctions, namely, (i) discriminative price auction, (ii) uniform price auction, and (iii) random nth price auction to investigate bidding behaviors and efficiency levels in allocating conservation subsidies. Both uniform and random nth price auctions were able to encourage cost revealing bids. Random nth price auction was able to engage the off-margin bidders. However, discriminative price auction was more cost efficient compared to the other two auctions.