Ben came to economics from the natural sciences. He is motivated by a passion for the natural world and  first pursued an undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford, where it became apparent that issues of overexploitation were problems which science could largely not address; rather, solutions would be found through a better understanding of human behaviour and incentives. Therefore, he pursued a PhD in Environmental Economics at the University of Exeter, where he was primarily supervised by Brett Day.

Ben is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Dragon Capital team. His research focuses on understanding how institutions can be developed to better facilitate efficient use of the natural environment. Ben has examined how delegating monitoring decisions to individual agents can achieve efficient effort with minimal monitoring costs, and in both the lab and the field, how procurement (aka reverse) auctions can be used to select participants, and determine how much they are paid, in payment for ecosystem service schemes.

Ben’s research is primarily focused on mechanism design in the the context of the environment. He uses a variety of methods; developing simple models to capture the essence of the problem, and then typically combining these with data, either from the lab or real world (be that RCTs or quasi-experimental evidence).

In his PhD, he examined how delegating monitoring decisions to individual agents can achieve efficient effort with minimal monitoring costs, and in both the lab and the field, how procurement (aka reverse) auctions may be used to select participants, and determine how much they are paid, in payment for ecosystem service schemes.

During Ben’s postdoc, he has continued to pursue similar lines of inquiry, including expanding the research agenda to look at how best to facilitate environmental markets involving multiple buyers and ecosystem services. He has additionally started work on two further projects. The first looks at the drivers of forest regrowth, and the second considers what aspects of biodiversity people value.

Ben’s research agenda is very much motivated by an aim to improve real-world outcomes, and he relishes working with external stakeholders such as governmental departments, water companies and market operators.