| Biologists and conservation advocates have expressed grave concern over perceived threats to biological diversity. "Biodiversity prospecting" -- the search among naturally occurring organisms for new products of agricultural, industrial, and, particularly, pharmaceutical value -- has been advanced as both a mechanism and a motive for conserving biological diversity. Economists and others have attempted to estimate the value of biodiversity for use in new pharmaceutical project research. Most of these existing approaches are incomplete, however, as they have not considered full social welfare, i.e., both consumer surplus and profit. This paper addresses social welfare by calibrating a model of competition between differentiated products with data from the... |
