This article first constructs a theoretical model of land use by swidden cultivators when these cultivators can choose whether to grow a cash crop or a food/subsistence crop. Second, it studies the land quality accumulation decision faced by shifting cultivators and, in the process, it shows how...

The sizeable literature on extinction in economics has paid scant attention to the problem of constructing measures of species extinction. Moreover, this literature has not studied the question of species extinction in stochastic systems that are jointly determined. Consequently, the objective...

Batabyal and Beladi (2004) have used a game model to study trade in a renewable resource between a single buyer and a single seller. The buyer uses a unit tariff to obliquely encourage conservation of the renewable resource and the entire harvest from the resource is exported to the importing...

Developing countries in South Asia and elsewhere are frequently ravaged by floods. An important part of most flood management programmes is the provision of safe drinking water (SDW) to prevent the spread of diseases. How should a government agency that is interested in distributing SDW to flood...

Although arranged and love marriages have been around for a long time there seems to be no comparative analyses in the economics literature of the relative merits of one or the other kind of marriage. As such, the purpose of this note is to conduct a theoretical inquiry into the desirability of...

This note addresses the following hitherto unstudied question in rangeland management: What is the steady state distribution of livestock animals for rangelands that are managed using short duration grazing? This paper uses the theory of alternating renewal processes to answer this question and...

A long-standing question in range management concerns the relative importance of the stocking rate versus the length of time during which animals graze a particular rangeland. Recently, Batabyal and co-workers provided a theoretical answer to this question. Given the importance of this question...

In a recent paper, Batabyal (Theory and Decision, 1997) has analysed the decision making process in arranged marriages. In particular, Batabyal shows that a marrying agent's optimal policy depends only on the nature of the current marriage proposal, independent of whether there is recall of...

The notion of a reservation quality or utility is a key feature of Batabyal's (2003a) recent analysis of decision making in arranged marriages. In this model, the magnitude of the reservation utility has a nontrivial impact on the decision to accept or decline a marriage proposal. Even so,...

Recently, Batabyal proposed an unconventional population control policy that is sensitive to the cultural desire for male progeny in many Asian nations. Although the proposed policy is culturally sensitive, a potential problem with this policy is that the aggregate size of the national...