Valuing Research Leads: Bioprospecting and the Conservation of Genetic Resources
UC Berkeley Law and Economics Working Paper No. 00-11
36 Pages Posted: 12 Jan 2000
There are 2 versions of this paper
Valuing Research Leads: Bioprospecting and the Conservation of Genetic Resources
Valuing Research Leads: Bioprospecting and the Conservation of Genetic Resources
Date Written: 2000
Abstract
Bioprospecting has been touted as a source of finance for biodiversity conservation. Recent work has suggested that the bioprospecting value of the "marginal unit" of genetic resources is likely to be vanishingly small, creating essentially no conservation incentive. This result is shown to flow specifically from a stylized description of the research process as one of brute-force testing, unaided by an organizing scientific framework. Neither the biological literature nor the behavior of industry actors lends clear support to the contention that natural products prospecting proceeds on the basis of randomized search. Scientific models channel research effort towards leads for which the expected productivity of discoveries is highest. Leads of unusual promise then command information rents, associated with their role in reducing the costs of search. When genetic materials are abundant, information rents are virtually unaffected by increases in the profitability of product discovery, and decline as technology improvements lower search costs. Numerical simulation results suggest that, under plausible conditions, the bioprospecting value of certain genetic resources could be large enough to support market-based conservation of biodiversity. The results call into question the conclusions of earlier analyses that had argued that biodiversity prospecting offers no hope as a meaningful source of finance for biodiversity conservation.
JEL Classification: Q2, D8
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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