Economics typically assumes that injured natural resources are restored along a fixed path of increasing marginal costs. By contrast, many restoration efforts-such as cleaning a contaminated aquifer or replacing the sand on an oil-tarnished beach-are characterized by destinaton-driwen costs, which depend mainly on final quality, not the prerestoration quality. Given the resulting nonconvexities in cost, the optimal level of restoration may be a Discontinuous and nonmonotonic function of post-injury quality.
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