[Federal Register Volume 86, Number 4 (Thursday, January 7, 2021)]
[Notices]
[Pages 1084-1086]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2021-00004]


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DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

Economic Research Service


Notice of Intent to Request New Information Collection

AGENCY: Economic Research Service, USDA.

ACTION: Notice and request for comments.

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SUMMARY: In accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 and 
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) implementing regulations, the 
U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (ERS) invites 
the general public and other Federal agencies to take this opportunity 
to comment on a proposed new information collection for a study of 
``Conservation Auction Behavior: Effects of Default Offers and Score 
Updating.''

DATES: Written comments on this notice must be received on or before 
March 8, 2021 to be assured of consideration.

ADDRESSES: Address all comments concerning this notice to Steven 
Wallander, Rural and Resource Economics Division, Economic Research 
Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1400 Independence Ave. SW, 
Mail Stop 1800, Washington DC 20250-0002. Submit electronic comments to 
[email protected] .
    All written comments will be available for public inspection during 
regular business hours (8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (Eastern time), Monday 
through Friday). To arrange access to the comments, contact Steven 
Wallander at the email address listed above.
    All responses to this notice will be summarized and included in the 
request for Office of Management and Budget approval. All comments and 
replies will be a matter of public record. Comments are invited on: (a) 
Whether the proposed collection of information is necessary for the 
proper performance of the functions of the agency, including whether 
the information shall have practical utility; (b) the accuracy of the 
agency's estimate of the burden of the proposed collection of 
information, including the validity of the methodology and assumptions 
used; (c) ways to enhance the quality, utility, and clarity of the 
information to be collected; and (d) ways to minimize the burden of the 
collection of information on those who are to respond, including use of 
appropriate automated, electronic, mechanical, or other technological 
collection techniques or other forms of information technology.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: For further information contact Steven 
Wallander at the mailing address listed above or by phone: (202) 694-
5546.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Title: Conservation Auction Behavior: 
Effects of Default Offers and Score Updating.
    OMB Number: To be assigned by OMB.
    Expiration Date: Three years from approval date.
    Type of Request: New information collection.
    Abstract: In accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 
(Pub. L. 104-12) and OMB regulations at 5 CFR part 1320 (60 FR 44978, 
August 29, 1995), this notice announces USDA Economic Research 
Services' intention to request approval from the Office of Management 
and Budget (OMB) for a new data collection effort.
    This data collection will use an online simulated auction 
experiment with former participants in the USDA Conservation Reserve 
Program (CRP) general signup and university students to (1) study the 
anchoring effect of using a high-scoring default offer in the CRP 
enrollment software rather than an active-choice default, and (2) study 
how the timing of information about final ranking score in the software 
influences responsive to baseline ranking scores. Outputs for the 
experiment will be used to inform potential updates to the CRP software 
and enrollment software as well as future lab experiments on general 
conservation auctions.
    USDA's Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) enrolls environmentally 
sensitive cropland in long-term contracts. Enrolled landowners receive 
annual rental payments for establishing the approved conservation 
vegetative cover and not farming the land. Most land is enrolled 
through the CRP General Signup, a multi-unit, sealed-bid, reverse 
auction. Offers are ranked on both quality and price. Participants can 
increase the probability that their offer is accepted by agreeing to a 
higher quality conservation cover practice or lowering their asking 
price (annual payment). By encouraging better practices and lower 
payments, the auction design improves the cost effectiveness of the 
CRP.

[[Page 1085]]

    The CRP general signup is a fairly complex decision environment in 
which participants must decide whether to select one of several dozen 
possible higher cost but higher scoring practices and whether to ask 
for lower annual rental payments in order to increase the likely that 
their offer is accepted into the program. A larger literature in other 
domains finds that in complex decision environments the initial option 
presented can have a significant anchoring effect in which final 
choices are closer to that default option than they would be otherwise. 
The current CRP general signup software uses an ``active choice'' 
default, in which the cover practice and annual rental choices are 
initially blank. Additional literature on complex decision-making 
environments finds that the way in which information is provided can 
influence outcome. The current CRP general signup software provides 
participants with their ranking score at the end of a series of offer 
selection screens. Providing live updating of that score earlier in the 
software could make respondents more sensitive to the underlying 
program incentives.
    Using a stylized version of the enrollment software to create a 
simulated (artefactual) CRP auction, the study will experimentally test 
the impacts on final practice and payment offers from two behavioral 
interventions: (i) A high-quality default starting offer; and (ii) live 
updates on the offer score at the point of offer selection. In 
addition, to assess the external validity (generalizability) of 
conducting experiments with students, a common practice in the 
literature on conservation auction design, this study will run the 
experiment with both a sample of university students (drawn from the 
full population of undergraduate and graduate students at the 
University of Delaware) and a sample of former participants in the 
General Signup to test whether the two populations respond differently 
to the behavioral interventions.
    The information to be collected in this proposed initiative is 
necessary to test the expected behavioral responses to these changes in 
the auction information environment. Such responses cannot be estimated 
using observational data because there is not systematic variation in 
the information environment. In addition, such responses cannot be 
estimated using mathematical programming models because the underlying 
psychological drivers of anchoring effects are highly context specific. 
By using experiments, we will be able to identify whether the effects 
observed in other complex decision-making environments are also likely 
in the context of a large conservation auction like the CRP. We plan to 
use these experiments to inform possible future redesigns of the CRP 
general signup software and enrollment process by the Farm Service 
Agency (FSA), future experiments using simulated conservation auctions, 
and the overall effort to extrapolated from the larger literature on 
conservation auction experiments that relied primarily on students as 
subjects.
    Participation in this experiment will be voluntary, and subjects 
will be recruited using multiple waves of mail and email 
communications. During each session, subjects will participate in four 
rounds of a conservation auction: One practice round and three actual 
rounds. Within each round, subjects will be assigned a different field 
for potential enrollment and, based on the characteristics of that 
field, will make a decision about which conservation cover practice to 
select and what annual rental payment to ask for. Sessions will be 
conducted using an on-line auction portal developed by the University 
of Delaware. Participants can sign into the web page and make their 
offers at any point during a two-week enrollment period. Recruitment 
will occur in multiple waves until the required number of subjects is 
met.
    Each session will last for an average 30 minutes, including 
watching an introductory video that explains the auction rules and 
software. Subjects will receive a show-up fee of $10. In addition to 
the show-up fee, subjects will receive compensation based on the 
decisions they make during the course of the experiment. After the 
enrollment period for each recruitment wave closes, one of the three 
auction rounds will be randomly selected and the highest-ranking offers 
will be ``accepted'' and receive a virtual payment. The number of 
winning offers will depend upon the complete pool of bids. Higher 
quality and lower cost offers will be more likely to get accepted but 
will receive lower payments if they are accepted. Payment levels are 
higher for the farmer population than for the student population since 
the lower level of incentives for students is one of the major reasons 
that many conservation auction studies use only a student population. 
We expect the winning bids to receive an average of $40 for farmers and 
$15 for students, not including the show-up fee. In designing our 
experimental procedures and payment levels, we took into consideration 
academic standards, statistical power considerations, budgetary 
limitations, and discussions between OMB and ERS regarding this and 
other approved experimental research.
    Authority: These data will be collected under the legal authority 
of 7 U.S.C. 2204(a).
    ERS intends to protect respondent information under the Privacy Act 
of 1974 and 7 U.S.C. 2276. ERS has decided not to invoke the 
Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act of 
2002 (CIPSEA). The complexity and cost necessary to invoke CIPSEA is 
not justified given the nature of the collection; the collection will 
be conducted by the University of Delaware and hosted in non-government 
owned computer systems, where CIPSEA compliance cannot be assured.
    Affected Public: Half of the respondents will be farmers or 
farmland owners who previously participated in at least one CRP general 
signup. The other half will be students at the University of Delaware.
    Estimated Number of Respondents and Respondent Burden: Since 
recruitment will occur through multiple waves to reach the target 
number of participants, the total respondent burden for participation 
time will be constant and the total respondent burden for recruitment 
will depend upon the participation rate. Under lower participation 
rates, the respondent burden of recruitment is higher. Since students 
will be recruited through email and farmers will be recruited through 
mail, the burden per subject for recruitment is slightly lower (3 
minutes) for students than for farmers (5 minutes). For all subjects 
who opt to participate, the expected time to complete the experiment 
online is 30 minutes.
    Under a conservative assumption that the participation rate will be 
10 percent of the sampled population for farmers and 25 percent of the 
sampled population for students, the public respondent burden for this 
information collection is estimated to be 2,033 hours. The calculations 
are shown in the table below based on a sample of 10,000 farmers that 
results in 1,000 farmer participants and a sample of 4,000 students 
that results in a sample of 1,000 student participants. At higher 
participation rates of 20 percent for farmers and 33 percent for 
students, the total respondent burden would be 1,567 hours.

[[Page 1086]]



                                   Sample Burden Hours: 10% Response Rate for Farmers, 25% Response Rate for Students
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                                                                             Responses                                   Non-Response
                                                              ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                  Sample size                              Subtotal                               Subtotal      Total
                                                                  Count       Minutes/      burden       Count       Minutes/      burden       burden
                                                                              response      hours                    response      hours        hours
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Farmer Population:
    Recruitment.................................       10,000        1,000            5         83.3        9,000            5        750.0        833.3
    Participation...............................  ...........        1,000           30        500.0  ...........  ...........  ...........        500.0
                                                 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Total...................................  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........      1,333.3
Student Population:
    Recruitment.................................        4,000        1,000            3         50.0        3,000            3        150.0        200.0
    Participation...............................  ...........        1,000           30        500.0  ...........  ...........  ...........        500.0
                                                 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Total...................................  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........        700.0
                                                 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            Total Both Populations..............  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........      2,033.3
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    Comments: Comments are invited on: (a) Whether the proposed 
collection of information is necessary for the proper performance of 
the functions of the Agency, including whether the information will 
have practical utility; (b) the accuracy of the Agency's estimate of 
the burden of the proposed collection of information, including the 
validity of the methodology and assumptions used; (c) ways to enhance 
the quality, utility, and clarity of the information to be collected; 
(d) ways to minimize the burden of the collection of information on 
those who are to respond, including through the use of appropriate 
automated, electronic, mechanical, or other technological collection 
techniques or other forms of information technology. Comments should be 
sent to the address in the preamble. All responses to this notice will 
be summarized and included in the request for OMB approval. All 
comments will also become a matter of public record.

Spiro Stefanou,
Administrator, Economic Research Service.
[FR Doc. 2021-00004 Filed 1-6-21; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 3410-18-P