This paper uses experimental data to test for a complementary relationship between formal regulations imposed on a community to conserve a local natural resource and nonbinding verbal agreements to do the same. Our experiments were conducted in the field in three regions of Colombia. Each group...

This paper uses laboratory experiments to test the theoretical observations that both the violations of competitive risk-neutral firms and the marginal effectiveness of increased enforcement across firms are independent of differences in their abatement costs and their initial allocations of...

Since firms in an emissions trading program are linked together through a permit market, so too are their compliance choices. Thus, enforcement strategies for trading programs must account for not only the direct effects of enforcement on compliance and emissions decisions, but also the indirect...

This paper uses laboratory experiments to test individual responses to policies that seek to encourage firms to voluntarily discover and disclose violations of environmental standards. We find that while it is possible to motivate a significant number of voluntary disclosures without adversely...

Since firms in an emissions trading program are linked together through a permit market, so too are their compliance choices. Thus, enforcement strategies for trading programs must account for not only the direct effects of enforcement on compliance and emissions decisions, but also the indirect...

A main research focus in many Social Dilemma Games is the suitability of external institutional treatments in inducing socially optimal outcomes. It is likely that participating subjects exhibit unobserved heterogeneity in their reaction to these treatments. This type of “institutional...

We examine individual harvesters’ preferences for government enforcement of a quota imposed on the exploitation of a common pool resource. We develop a model of Nash behavior by identical risk neutral harvesters to explain individual equilibrium preferences for enforcement of an efficient...

We present results from laboratory emissions markets designed to investigate the effects of price controls and permit banking on limiting permit price risk. While both instruments reduce between-period price volatility and within-period price dispersion, combining price controls and permit...