Global warming caused by accumulation of emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is a public bad, addressing which requires collective action by all the countries of the world. Under the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), most countries have negotiated the Kyoto Protocol for GHG...

We suggest that overconfidence among policymakers explains why formal decision power over monetary policy is given to committees, while much of the real power to set policy remains with central bank chairmen. Overconfidence implies that the chairman underweights advice from his staff, increasing...

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries - Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly...

We study a laboratory social dilemma game in which incentives to steal from others lead to the socially inefficient diversion of resources from production unless the members of a given mini-society can abide by norms of non-theft or engage in low cost collective protection of their members'...

This paper studies pillage games (Jordan in J Econ Theory 131.1:26-44, 2006, "Pillage and property"), which are well suited to modelling unstructured power contests. To enable empirical test of pillage games' predictions, it relaxes a symmetry assumption that agents' intrinsic contributions to a...

Recent empirical studies confirm a positive relationship between trade liberalization or trade openness and the quality of domestic economic institutions. An isolated analysis of trade openness per se, however, may grossly simplify the mechanisms at work, as the linkage between open trade and...

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of struggles over resources by studying a game between a producer that can guard and buy fortifications and a pirate. It is assumed that the returns from defence and raiding depends on the ratio of the resources...

This paper presents a theoretical model to investigate the potential environmental consequences of weather index based insurance, a tool for mitigating weather risk that is gaining momentum in developing countries. We model potential effects of index insurance for pastoralists on animal stocking...

Citizens political participation to protests is a crucial issue for any political system, whether democratic or autocratic. Political systems have different ways of dealing with citizens' protests, determining cost and benefit of public dissent, responding to public requests and allowing...

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience offer systematic evidence that fictional works exert a surprisingly strong influence on readers and have the power to shape their opinions and worldviews. Building on these findings, we study 'Potterian economics', the economic ideas, insights, and...