IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/13564.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Eminent Domain Versus Government Purchase of Land Given Imperpect Information About Owners' Valuation

Author

Listed:
  • Steven Shavell

Abstract

Governments employ two basic policies for acquiring land: taking it through exercise of their power of eminent domain; and purchasing it. The social desirability of these two policies is compared in a model in which the government's information about landowners' valuations is imperfect. Under this assumption, the policy of purchase possesses the market test advantage that the government obtains land only if an owner's valuation is low enough that he is willing to sell it. However, the policy suffers from a drawback when the land that the government needs is owned by many parties. In that case, the government's acquisition will fail if any of the owners refuses to sell. Hence, the policy of eminent domain becomes appealing if the number of owners of the land is large. This conclusion holds regardless of whether the land that the government seeks is a parcel at a fixed location or instead may be located anywhere in a region.

Suggested Citation

  • Steven Shavell, 2007. "Eminent Domain Versus Government Purchase of Land Given Imperpect Information About Owners' Valuation," NBER Working Papers 13564, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13564
    Note: LE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w13564.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Thomas J. Miceli & Kathleen Segerson, 2007. "A Bargaining Model of Holdouts and Takings," American Law and Economics Review, American Law and Economics Association, vol. 9(1), pages 160-174.
    2. Munch, Patricia, 1976. "An Economic Analysis of Eminent Domain," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 84(3), pages 473-497, June.
    3. Hermalin, Benjamin E, 1995. "An Economic Analysis of Takings," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 11(1), pages 64-86, April.
    4. Flavio Menezes & Rohan Pitchford, 2004. "A model of seller holdout," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 24(2), pages 231-253, August.
    5. George J. Mailath & Andrew Postlewaite, 1990. "Asymmetric Information Bargaining Problems with Many Agents," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 57(3), pages 351-367.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Miceli, Thomas J. & Segerson, Kathleen & Sirmans, C.F., 2008. "Tax Motivated Takings," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 61(4), pages 579-591, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Steven Shavell, 2010. "Eminent Domain versus Government Purchase of Land Given Imperfect Information about Owners' Valuations," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 53(1), pages 1-27, February.
    2. John Cadigan & Pamela Schmitt & Robert Shupp & Kurtis Swope, 2009. "An Experimental Study of the Holdout Problem in a Multilateral Bargaining Game," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 76(2), pages 444-457, October.
    3. Grossman, Zachary & Pincus, Jonathan & Shapiro, Perry & Yengin, Duygu, 2019. "Second-best mechanisms for land assembly and hold-out problems," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 1-16.
    4. Isaac, R. Mark & Kitchens, Carl & Portillo, Javier E., 2016. "Can buyer “mobility” reduce aggregation failures in land-assembly?," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 16-30.
    5. Portillo, Javier E., 2019. "Land-assembly and externalities: How do positive post-development externalities affect land aggregation outcomes?," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 104-124.
    6. Usha Sridhar & Sridhar Mandyam, 2013. "A Group Utility Maximizer Mechanism for Land Assembly," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 47(3), pages 466-488, October.
    7. Chaturvedi, Rakesh, 2020. "Fairness and partial coercion in land assembly," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 325-335.
    8. Dick M. Carpenter II & John K. Ross, 2010. "Do Restrictions on Eminent Domain Harm Economic Development?," Economic Development Quarterly, , vol. 24(4), pages 337-351, November.
    9. Kurtis Swope & Ryan Wielgus & Pamela Schmitt & John Cadigan, 2011. "Contracts, Behavior, and the Land-assembly Problem: An Experimental Study," Research in Experimental Economics, in: Experiments on Energy, the Environment, and Sustainability, pages 151-180, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    10. Kevin Guerin, 2002. "Protection against Government Takings: Compensation for Regulation?," Treasury Working Paper Series 02/18, New Zealand Treasury.
    11. Daniel Göller & Michael Hewer, 2014. "Economic Analysis of Taking Rules: The Bilateral Investment Case," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 170(3), pages 520-536, September.
    12. Fleck, Robert K. & Hanssen, F. Andrew, 2024. "Courts, legislatures, and evolving property rules: Lessons from eminent domain," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    13. Cadigan, John & Schmitt, Pamela & Shupp, Robert & Swope, Kurtis, 2011. "The holdout problem and urban sprawl: Experimental evidence," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(1), pages 72-81, January.
    14. Fleck, Robert K. & Hanssen, F. Andrew, 2010. "Repeated adjustment of delegated powers and the history of eminent domain," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 99-112, June.
    15. Zakharenko, Roman, 2021. "Optimal compulsion for private assembly of property," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    16. Parente, Michael D. & Winn, Abel M., 2012. "Bargaining behavior and the tragedy of the anticommons," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 84(2), pages 475-490.
    17. Casey B. Mulligan, 2015. "In-Kind Taxes, Behavior, and Comparative Advantage," NBER Working Papers 21586, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Lueck, Dean & Miceli, Thomas J., 2007. "Property Law," Handbook of Law and Economics, in: A. Mitchell Polinsky & Steven Shavell (ed.), Handbook of Law and Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 3, pages 183-257, Elsevier.
      • Dean Lueck & Thomas J. Miceli, 2004. "Property Law," Working papers 2004-04, University of Connecticut, Department of Economics.
    19. Sarkar, Soumendu, 2018. "Convergence of VCG mechanism to ex-post budget balance in a model of land acquisition," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 37-46.
    20. Chaturvedi, Rakesh & Kanjilal, Kiriti, 2021. "Experimental analysis of a land assembly mechanism," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 91(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
    • H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • H4 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods
    • K11 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Property Law

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13564. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.