The ambient tax is often considered as an efficient instrument to achieve a first best outcome of ambient pollution when the regulator cannot observe individual emissions, or when monitoring costs are prohibitive. While this view is supported to a large extent by experimental findings, there...

Risk and reliability dominate water supply discussions in the arid western United States due to increasing demand and finite, weather-dependent supply. Water markets have evolved in this region so agencies could meet this growing demand. In a few instances, water agencies turned to contractual...

This paper uses laboratory experiments to evaluate the performance of a deposit-refund mechanism used to enforce compliance with voluntary public-good commitments made in the absence of strong regulatory institutions. With this mechanism agents decide whether to join an agreement and pay a...

A number of studies of the positively-framed voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) public goods game have examined the role of context on participant behavior. Relatively little attention, however, has been given to the effects of context in negatively-framed VCM games even though this setting...

In nonpoint source pollution problems, the regulator does not observe each polluter’s individual emission, which prevents him from using the conventional policy instruments. Therefore, new instruments have been designed to regulate this type of pollution. In an experiment, we compare the...

This paper reports a preliminary experimental test of international quota trading on a market characterized by several dominant traders. Uncertain quota demand and supply imply true market-clearing prices that in general differ from an expected competitive quota price. However, in the experiment...

This paper presents an experimental study oftwo different pollution compliance games:collective vis-à-vis random fining as ameans to regulate non-pointpollution. Using samples from both Costa Ricancoffee mill managers and Costa Rican students,we find that the two games perform equivalentlybut,...

Over the last few years a great deal of research has focussed on hypothetical bias in value estimates obtained with the contingent valuation (CV) method and on means for ameliorating if not eliminating such bias. To date, efforts to eliminate hypothetical bias have relied on calibration...