Governments sometimes promote rules backed by sanctions too weak to make obedience privately optimal. Factors that may help make such rules effective include the presence of informal sanctions by peers, and implementation through voting. I study the impact of non-deterrent formal sanctions on...

I show how improper conditioning of beliefs can lead to under-contribution in public goods environments with interdependent values. I consider a simple model of a binary, excludable public good. In equilibrium, provision of the public good is good news about its value. Naive players who...

We run a public good experiment with four different treatments. The payoff function is chosen such that the Nash equilibrium (NE) and the collective optimum (CO) are both in the interior of the strategy space. We try to test the effect of varying the level of the collective optimum, which...

This paper considers a model of voluntary public good provision with two players and convex costs. I demonstrate that the provision of public good is higher in the sequential framework under fairly general conditions. This outcome shows that introducing convex costs may reverse under some...

Decisions on joint funding of continuous public goods between two agents often involve heterogeneous targets. We introduce loss functions in a contribution game in order to study the effect of this conflict. Unlike Varian (1994), joint contribution occurs only if the players’ targets are...

Using a simple two-group model of the private provision of public goods, this paper investigates how endogenous formation of within-group cooperation is affected by different types and degrees of between-group interactions. We show that when between-group interactions are of the same directions...

The effects of an agreement such as the Kyoto Protocol, which implicitly imposes a ceiling on the stock of pollution, have recently been studied in Hotelling models. We add pollution and a ceiling to the endogenous growth model of \cite{tsur2005scarcity} to study the effects of the ceiling on...

Using a world multi-sectoral, multi-regional trade model, this paper has investigated the economic and environmental implications of climate control coalitions cooperating on R&D investment that triggers low cost environmentally friendly technologies. We start with the Kyoto scenario where all...

There has been a lot of debate regarding the impact of emissions of pollutants on human health and the environment. Epidemiological studies tend to show the impact of increased ambient concentrations of pollutants on increased hospital admissions, mortality, morbidity, respiratory problems, etc....

VOCs and NOx are the primary precursors in the formation of ground-level ozone (SMOG). The rate of formation is a function of concentrations, temperature and sunlight strength. Both pollutants as well as the ozone itself can be transported over very long distances. Therefore, it can affect...