Agents face an ambiguous risk of biodiversity survival as well as ambiguous expected losses from its extinction. As a collectivity, agents are faced with the option of privately funding the protection of biodiversity for biomedical research. We propose two evolutionary models of threshold public...

Sedimentation in river beds, which results in social disamenities, is caused by soil erosion in farmed ecosystems surrounding those rivers. This paper introduces a "spatial"" corrective tax on soil erosion. We find that the optimal tax rule will depart from the classical Pigouvian method...

Large numbers of agricultural labor moved from the countryside to cities after the economic reforms in China. Migration and remittances play an important role in transforming the structure of rural household income. This paper examines the impact of rural-to-urban migration on rural poverty and...

This paper focuses on the disparity between willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept indices in nonmarket valuation. The substitution effect makes agents value net losses higher than opportunity losses. In regard to net losses, we show that imperfect substitutability respectively induces...

We elicit subjects' willingness to pay to reduce future risk. In our experiments, subjects are given a cash endowment and a risky lottery. They report their willingness to pay to exchange the risky lottery for a safe one. Subjects play the lottery either immediately, eight weeks later, or...

Uncertainties as to future supply costs of nonrenewable natural resources, such as oil and gas, raise the issue of the choice of supply sources. In a perfectly deterministic world, an efficient use of multiple sources of supply requires that any given market exhausts the supply it can draw from...

In this experimental study we examine behavior relating to voluntary contributions to reduce expected losses associated, for example, with the occurrence of natural disasters or major industrial accidents. We ask subjects to allocate tokens between a private investment and a public investment....

The economic models of tax compliance predict that individuals should evade taxes when the expected benefit of cheating is greater than its expected cost. When this condition is fulfilled, the high compliance however observed remains a puzzle. In this paper, we investigate the role of emotions...

We evaluate biodiversity in a real options framework, when the resources in use are substitutable. We examine optimal conservation decisions given that a biodiversity loss is irreversible and that future use values are uncertain. While species substitutability is generally believed to reduce the...

We conduct an experiment to test whether probability misperception may be a possible alternative to risk aversion to explain overbidding in independent first-price private-values auctions. The experimental outcomes indicate that subjects underestimate their probability of winning the auction,...