The precautionary principle (PP) applied to environmental policy stipulates that, in the presence of physical uncertainty, society must take robust preventive action to guard against worst-case outcomes. It follows that the higher the degree of uncertainty, the more aggressive this preventive...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Demand and supply analysis in fisheries often indicates the presence of instabilities and multiple equilibria, both in open access conditions and in the socially optimal solution. The associated management problems are further intensified by uncertainty on the evolution of the resource stock or...

The joint evolution of participating and complying firms in a public VA, along with the evolution of the pollution stock is examined. Replicator dynamics modeling participation and compliance are combined with pollution stock dynamics. Fast-slow selection dynamics are used to capture the fact...

We examine whether the use of the environment, proxied by CO2 emissions, as a factor of production contributes, in addition to conventional factors of production to output growth, and thus it should be accounted for in total factor productivity growth (TFPG) measurement and deducted from the...

We formulate two kinds of sustainability criteria by using feedback and arbitrary rules for selecting policy variables in non optimizing economies. We show that when policy variables are selected arbitrarily their accounting prices could determine sustainability in addition to the accounting...