Composite indicators are becoming increasingly infuential tools of environmental assessment and advocacy. Nonetheless, their use is controversial as they often rely on ad-hoc and theoretically problematic assumptions regarding normalization, aggregation, and weighting. Nonparametric data...

Many aspects of social welfare are intrinsically multidimensional. Composite indices at-tempting to reduce this complexity to a unique measure abound in many areas of economics and public policy. Comparisons based on such measures depend, sometimes critically, on how the different dimensions of...

Standard economic models of groundwater management impose restrictive assumptions regarding perfect transmissivity (i.e., the aquifer behaves as a bathtub), no external effects of groundwater stocks, observability of individual extraction rates, and/or homogenous agents. In this article, we...

Consider a collection of m indivisible objects to be allocated to n agents, where m ≥ n. Each agent falls in one of two distinct categories: either he (a) has a complete ordinal ranking over the set of individual objects, or (b) has a set of “plausible” benchmark von Neumann-Morgenstern...

How should a decision-maker allocate R&D funds when a group of experts provides divergent estimates on a technology's potential effectiveness? To address this question, we propose a simple decision-theoretic framework that takes into account ambiguity over the aggregation of expert opinion and a...

This paper develops linear quadratic robust control theory for a class of spatially invariant distributed control systems that appear in areas of economics such as New Economic Geography, management of ecological systems, optimal harvesting of spatially mobile species, and the like. Since this...

The present paper examines, within a dynamic framework, the use of information provision as a policy instrument to supplement environmental taxation. We assume that at least a fraction of consumers do not posses the required information to make the optimal choices, and that their behavior at...

Climate Engineering, and in particular Solar Radiation Management (SRM) has become a widely discussed climate policy option to study in recent years. However, its potentially strategic nature and unforeseen side effects provide major policy and scientific challenges. We study the role of the SRM...

We seek to explain the emergence of spatial heterogeneity regarding development and pollution on the basis of interactions associated with the movement of capital and polluting activities from one economy to another. We use a simple dynamical model describing capital accumulation along the lines...

Human economies and ecosystems form a coupled system coevolving in time and space, since human economies use ecosystems services and at the same time affect ecosystems through their production and consumption activities. The study of the interactions between human economies and ecosystems is...