Smart Markets for Water Resources: A Manual for Implementation

Why is trade in wholesale water so rare, when markets can actively trade bread, tractors, and electricity? This book shows that water markets fail because of high transaction costs, resulting in inefficient allocations and unpredictable environmental effects. To overcome these obstacles, this book proposes a trading mechanism called a smart market. A smart market is an auction cleared with optimization. A smart market can reduce the transaction costs of water trading, while improving the en...