This paper is aimed to assess, with two lab experiments, to what extent Kőszegi and Rabin's (2006) model of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences can explain Knetsch's (1989) endowment effect. Departing from past work, we design an experiment that treats the two goods (a mug and a...

Leisure activities such as local recreation trips usually take place in discrete blocks of time that are surrounded by time devoted to other commitments. It can be costly to transfer time between blocks to allow for longer outings. These observations affect the value of time within those blocks...

Property rights are commonly touted as a solution to common pool resource problems. But in practice the security of these property rights varies substantially owing to differences in design. In fisheries, the design of individual transferable quotas (ITQs) varies widely; the consequences of...

The problem of the commons is more important to our lives and thus more central to economics than a century ago when Katharine Coman led off the first issue of the American Economic Review. As the U.S. and other economies have grown, the carrying-capacity of the planet -- in regard to natural...

We show that grandfathering fishing rights to local users or recognizing first possessions is more dynamically efficient than auctions of such rights. It is often argued that auctions allocate rights to the highest-valued users and thereby maximize resource rents. We counter that rents are not...

Case studies suggest that Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) can be effective tools for fishery management. This study uses global datasets of MPAs and stock assessments to estimate the strength and robustness of their benefits. We apply multiple models, including a treatment-control pairing, a...

We study how the strength of property rights to individual extractive firms affects a regulator’s choice over exploitation rates for a natural resource. The regulator is modeled as an intermediary between current and future resource harvesters, rather than between producers and consumers, as...

Spatial connectivity of renewable resources induces a spatial externality in extraction. We explore the consequences of decentralized spatial property rights in the presence of spatial externalities. We generalize the notion of unitization - developed to enhance cooperative extraction of oil and...

We analyze a seldom used, but highly promising form of rights-based management over common pool resources that involves the self-selection of heterogeneous fishermen into sectors. The fishery management regime assigns one portion of an overall catch quota to a voluntary cooperative, with the...

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) provides direct evidence of how human activities contribute to a feedback loop that can result in multiple changes in ecosystem services by creating localized warming as well as differences in vegetated landscapes in areas surrounding the urban core. This paper...