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. Scientific models channel research effort toward 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.
Rausser’s work in environmental economics began when he was at the University of Chicago One of the first is first EPA focused on air pollution and the siding of fossil fuel plants (Fishelson, Rausser, Cohen 1976). He followed this work with a number of investigations of environmental damages or harm resulting from contamination. Diminution of property values resulting from environmental contamination have been estimated on numerous occasions all of the scholarly work follows directly from litigation in a famous case under the name Mangini. The scholarly work includes referred journal publication with Jill McCluskey: McCluskey and Rausser (2001), McCluskey, Huffaker and Rausser (2002), McCluskey and Rausser (2003), McCluskey and Rausser (2003). Much work in environmental finance has taken place with regard to litigation that has subsequently emerged in scholarly publications, including Hyde, Rausser, and Simon (2000), Rausser and Fargeix (1994). In the context of urban economics, a creative framework for the relationship between pollution and land use has been published in Arnott, Hochman, and Rausser (2008). A general synthesis of the toxic tort environmental damages has also been published: Berkman and Rausser (2006). In the case of groundwater contamination and the cost of remediation, there are a number of publications resulting from expert testimony. This includes the Giannini Report #349 (Rausser, Adams, Montgomery, Smith 2006). This report provides a complete representation of the California economy and the consequences of banning MTBE and replacing MTBE with ethanol to satisfy oxygenated regulation for the state of California under the Air Quality Act. Another study goes to the existence of wilderness areas and their inherent value to society, published in JASA (Rausser and Olivera 1976). Perhaps his most seminal environmental economics work is on the economics of biodiversity. His paper from the JPE won the Outstanding Research Discovery Award from the AAEA in 2001 (Rausser and Small 2000).