Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...

In the search for effective pesticide risk management tools, the design of pesticide risk indicators is nowadays receiving increasing attention as a complement to more established regulatory strategies. In the present paper, we apply some recently developed pesticide risk indices and test their...

We study two aspects of globalization. It allows a decision-maker to go beyond his own local experience and to learn from other decision-makers in addressing common problems. This improves the identification and diffusion of best practices. It also provides extra information to `markets' that...

The 1994 International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) established goals for the expansion of population assistance. This global effort has so far not sufficiently been supported by donor funds. Dynamic panel estimation methods are used to see what lies behind the sharing of...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <I>Social Networks</I> (2012). Vol. 34(4), pages 161-179.<P> This paper proposes a new measure for a group's ability to lead society to adopt their standard of behavior, which in particular takes account of the time the group takes to convince the whole...</p></i>

This study addresses the achievements of cooperative agreements in sustainable agriculture policy. After an economic analysis of multi-actor choice situations, it focuses the attention on the self-organizing potential of regional market parties in order to comply with environmental policy...

In this paper the efficient allocation of natural recreational areasis analysed. Natural recreational areas have the features of publicgoods. We present the efficient allocation of this non-excludablepublic good in a rational general equilibrium model withheterogeneous agents. This allows us to...

The values of goods and services provided by natural and constructed wetlands are examined through a meta-analysis of 418 observations of the economic value of 186 wetlands. Water quality improvement, non-consumptive recreation, and provision of natural habitat and biodiversity turn out to be...

Various plants and resources such as orchards are vulnerable to the detrimental effects of successful invasions by alien animal or plant species. To outline an appropriate policy response, we first use renewal theory to construct a stochastic model of optimal orchard management in the presence...

The widespread use of pesticides in agriculture provides a particularly complex pattern of multidimensionalnegative side-effects, ranging from food safety related effects to the deterioratian of farmland ecosystems.The assessment of the economic implications of such negative processes is fraught...