We examine how social preferences affect the workings of voluntary green payment schemes and show that a regulator could use facilitation services along with a social reward to generate better ecological outcome at less cost by exploiting a farmer’s social preferences to gain a green social-image/reputation. To motivate our model, we first present the results of an incentivized elicitation survey in Scotland which shows that there is a social norm of biodiversity protection on private land among farmers. Moreover, the results of a discrete choice experiment reveal that farmers are willing to give up economic rents for more publicity of their conservation activities; this confirms the relevance of reputational gain in the context of green payment schemes. Our model assumes two types of farmers, green and brown, with a green farmer taking more biodiversity protection actions than a brown farmer. We design a menu of contracts that offers both monetary incentives and non-monetary incentives (a facilitation service with social reward) to induce both type of farmers to join the scheme and to exert first-best levels (i.e., symmetric information levels) of action. Results show that under asymmetric information the regulator can implement the symmetric information equilibrium levels of biodiversity protection actions with only non-monetary incentives for the green farmer and only monetary incentives for the brown farmer. This implies that a regulator can ensure better environmental outcomes, at a lower cost, by exploiting farmers’ social preferences and by offering non-monetary incentives.

我们研究了社会偏好如何影响自愿绿色支付计划的运作，并表明监管机构可以利用促进服务以及社会奖励来以更低的成本产生更好的生态成果通过利用农民的社会偏好获得绿色的社会形象/声誉来节省成本。为了激励我们的模型，我们首先介绍苏格兰的激励启发调查，结果表明，在农民中，私有土地上存在生物多样性保护的社会规范。此外，一项离散选择实验的结果表明，农民愿意为增加其保护活动的宣传而放弃经济租金。这证实了在绿色支付计划中声誉收益的相关性。我们的模型假设两种类型的农民的绿色和棕色，有绿色的农民比采取更多的生物多样性保护行动褐色农民。我们设计了一个合同菜单，该菜单同时提供货币激励和非货币激励（带有社会奖励的便利服务），以诱使两种类型的农民加入该计划并发挥最佳水平的行动（即对称的信息水平） 。结果表明，在信息不对称的情况下，监管机构可以实现对生物多样性保护行动的对称信息均衡水平，而绿色农户只有非货币激励措施，棕色农户只有货币激励措施。这意味着，监管机构可以通过利用农民的社会偏好和提供非货币激励措施，以较低的成本确保更好的环境结果。