نظریه ی قرارداد و مفاهیم برای چندسال قرارداد محصول انرژی

This article provides an overview of modern contract theory and discusses the implications of the theory for contracting for perennial dedicated energy crops. We discuss some of the unique challenges of contracting for dedicated energy crops used for the production of advanced biofuels and survey some of the relevant concepts and research from the contract theory literature to address these challenges. We focus primarily on the “mechanism design” or “complete contracts” approach to contracting, which involves optimizing some objective function (e.g. profits, costs, etc.) with respect to contract terms, subject to important incentive constraints. The solution to these optimization problems typically highlight important tradeoffs that a contract designer needs to consider in order to maximize profits and/or minimize costs.

This article provides a selected survey of modern contract theory, highlighting specific concepts that can be useful for framing important issues related to dedicated energy crop contracting. Many dedicated energy crops, such as switchgrass or miscanthus, have little commercial history and production cycles that can last for over ten years. This creates some unique challenges for biofuels plants that will rely on feedstocks produced from perennial dedicated energy crops. At the same time, an increasing amount of public resources are being devoted toward developing renewable fuels in the U.S. For example, the federal Biomass Crop Assistance Program provides a subsidy of up to $45 per dry ton to producers of advanced biofuels. Thus, understanding the economic principles that motivate the tradeoffs for dedicated energy crop supply chains is important and will become more so over time.