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The United States Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) has evolved from near open enrollment, to competitive enrollment, and now to a mixture of competitive and targeted enrollment. This paper reviews the history of the CRP and the evolution of its enrollment mechanism. I discuss the use of bid caps and the Environmental Benefits Index bid ranking mechanism in the “general” CRP; and the use of highly targeted, but non-competitive, “continuous” CRP. Possible challenges of these designs are discussed, and alternative auction mechanisms are considered that could be more cost effective.
Daniel Hellerstein (Sat,) studied this question.