Research Area
Allocation, congestion, reservation systems, and equitable access to high-demand public recreation sites.
Featured
Low prices, limited capacity, and increasing demand contribute to intense competition for public campsites. The paper studies reservation, cancellation, and no-show decisions and compares pricing and fee policies that affect utilization, surplus, and distributional outcomes.
Rationed access is used to promote sustainable recreation, but online first-come, first-served reservation systems can create buying frenzies. The paper compares river permits allocated through reservation frenzies and lotteries to study distributional effects across places and income.
This working paper studies how reservation windows and access rules shape equity in national park visitation when capacity is scarce and demand is highly concentrated.
This paper studies when expanding use of a congestible common property resource can be welfare improving, emphasizing sorting, congestion, and entry in shared-resource settings.
Although the empirical setting is a collectible market, the paper speaks directly to conservation settings where scarcity and rarity shape value. It provides evidence on how people value rare goods, with implications for thinking about rare species, conservation priorities, and public willingness to protect scarce natural resources.