资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Motivated by traffic congestion and air pollution, Beijing is one of several major cities to restrict vehicle ownership. Beijing residents who want to obtain a car must first win a lottery. We examine the welfare cost of preventing people from owning cars using a new survey of Beijing lottery participants that we designed and conducted explicitly for this purpose. We find that restricting vehicle ownership reduced private welfare by 26 billion yuan. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the benefits of lower congestion and pollution roughly equal the costs. Our WTP estimates indicate a net welfare gain of about 20 billion yuan from replacing Beijing’s lottery with an auction, which is smaller than the gains estimated previously in the literature.