LAUSR

Abstract Market mechanisms for land assembly problems suffer from a holdout problem and coercive legal solutions like eminent domain introduce new inefficiencies. A new mechanism that is not fully market-based but attempts price discovery is proposed, experimentally studied and is shown to improve efficiency. The mechanism is fully specified by two parameters - a percentile value of the empirical distribution of ask-prices that serves as a trading threshold for the buyer and a quantum of penalty to be applied to landowners who bid relatively very high. In a 2 × 2 treatment, it is found that reducing the trading threshold and increasing the penalty improves the efficiency performance.