Internet, mp3 files, peer-to-peer software and digital technologies for copying have radically modified the music sector. In this paper I present a theoretical model, that investigates the consequences of the appearance of a pirate low quality good (typically a mp3 file) in the music market. In...

The ever greater role given to public participation by laws and regulations, in particular in the field of environmental management calls for new operational methods and tools for managers and practitioners. This paper analyses the potentials and the critical limitations of current approaches in...

In this paper, we illustrate how surveys can be used to elicit the preferences of the public and of policymakers and city officials for regeneration projects at urban sites. Our methodology uses rating exercises, coupled with conjoint-choice stated preferences for the general public and with...

This paper models the dynamic process through which a large society may succeed in building up its “social capital” by establishing a stable and dense pattern of interaction among its members. In the model, agents interact according to a collection of infinitely repeated Prisoner’s...

We study learning and influence in a setting where agents communicate according to an arbitrary social network and naïvely update their beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of their neighbors’ opinions. A focus is on conditions under which beliefs of all agents in large societies...

This survey paper examines various information insufficiencies in biodiversity conservation and their impact of regulatory choices. We surveyed the literature in the field and identified four major types of informational insufficiencies in making efficient biodiversity conservation decisions: 1)...

We present experiments on repeated non-cooperative network formation games, based on Bala and Goyal (2000). We treat the one-way and the two-ways flow models, each for high and low link costs. The models show both multiple equilibria and coordination problems. We conduct experiments under...

Economists and sociologists disagree over markets' potential to assume functions typically performed by networks of personal connections, first among them the transmission of information. This paper begins from a model of labor markets where social ties are stronger between similar individuals...

This paper analyses the efficient management of nonpoint source pollution (NPS) under limited pollution control budget and incomplete information inherent in NPS pollution. By incorporating information acquisition into a pollution control model, it focuses on the tradeoff between data collection...

We examine patterns of acquiring non-native languages in a model with two languages and two populations with heterogeneous learning skills, where every individual faces a binary choice of learning the foreign language or refraining from doing so. We show that both interior and corner linguistic...