Nowadays, a process can be observed in Germany where electricity producing and trading firms react to the electricity market liberalisation by merging market shares, since the year 2000, which reduces the number of suppliers and influences production and consumer prices. This paper discusses...

The problems about diversity concern various themes. We will show that the economic theory can contribute by itself to the debate in progress. It could seem paradoxical, but what is called the “dismal science” can serve to attenuate some pessimistic attitudes, putting in prominence a...

The theory of international environmental agreements overwhelmingly assumes that governments engage as unitary agents. Each government makes choices based on benefits and costs that are simple national aggregates, and similarly on a single set of national-level motivations, together drawing a...

This article provides a non-technical overview of important results of the game theoretical literature on the formation and stability of international environmental agreements (IEAs) on transboundary pollution control. It starts out by sketching features of first and second best solutions to the...

The present stalemate in climate negotiations has led policy analysts and economists to explore the possible emergence of alternative climate regimes. This paper explores the idea of replacing international cooperation on greenhouse gas emission control with international cooperation on...

In essence, any international environmental agreement (IEA) implies cooperation of a form or another. The paper seeks for logical foundations of this. It first deals with how the need for cooperation derives from the public good aspect of the externalities involved, as well as with where the...

This paper establishes sufficient conditions for the existence of a stable coalition structure in the ”coalition unanimity” game of coalition formation, first defined by Hart and Kurz (1983) and more recently studied by Yi (1997, 2000). Our conditions are defined on the strategic form game...

A model of group formation is presented where the number of groups is fixed and a person can only join a group if the group’s members approve the person’s joining. Agents have either local status preferences (each agent wants to be the highest status agent in his group) or global status...

The evolution of large-scale cooperation among genetic strangers is a fundamental unanswered question in the social sciences. Behavioral economics has persuasively shown that so called ‘strong reciprocity’ plays a key role in accounting for the endogenous enforcement of cooperation. Insofar...

School of Economics, University of Nottingham, University Park Campus and Department of Economics (AE1), Maastricht University