Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Economics Research Institute Study Paper

Volume

18

Publisher

Utah State University Department of Economics

Publication Date

2004

Rights

Copyright for this work is held by the author. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. For more information contact the Institutional Repository Librarian at digitalcommons@usu.edu.

First Page

1

Last Page

17

Abstract

The notion of a reservation value is a key feature of most contemporary dynamic and stochastic models of land development. It is clear that the magnitude of the reservation value has a fundamental bearing on the decision to develop or preserve land. This notwithstanding, many papers that analyze land development in a dynamic and stochastic setting treat a landowner's reservation value as an exogenous variable. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to endogenize the reservation value in the context of a model of land development over time and under uncertainty. Our analysis shows that the optimal reservation value is the solution to a specific maximization problem. In addition, we also show that there exist theoretical circumstances in which the optimal reservation value is unique.

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