Consider an n-person economy in which efficiency is independent of distribution but the cardinal properties of the agents’ utility functions precludes transferable utility (a property we call “Almost TU”). We show that Almost TU is a necessary and sufficient condition for all agents to...

The management of natural commons is typically subject to threshold effects: past a certain agregate consumption level, the benefits of the commons will be lost for everybody. As dealing with the global climate illustrates, moreover, it is often impossible to locate an actual threshold with...