Cartels are inherently instable. Each cartelist is best off if it breaks the cartel, while the remaining firms remain loyal. If firms interact only once, if products are homogenous, if firms compete in price, and if marginal cost is constant, theory even predicts that strategic interaction...

Under common law, the standard remedy for breach of contract is expectation damages. Under continental law, the standard is specific performance. The common law solution is ex post efficient. But is it also ex ante efficient? We use experimental methods to test whether knowing that...

We study the effect of voting when insiders' public goods provision may affect passive outsiders. Without voting insiders' contributions do not differ, regardless of whether outsiders are positively or negatively affected or even unaffected. Voting on the recommended contribution level enhances...

In the policy debate, intellectual property is often justified by what seems to be a straightforward argument: if innovators are not protected against others appropriating their ideas, incentives for innovation are suboptimally low. Now in most industries for most potential users, appropriating...

Public goods are dealt with in two literatures that neglect each other. Mechanism design advises a social planner that expects individuals to misrepresent their valuations. Experiments study the provision of the good when preferences might be non-standard. We introduce the problem of the...

We evaluate the effectiveness of non optimal and temporally inconsistent incentive policies for regulating the exploitation of a renewable common-pool resource. The corresponding game is an N-person discrete-time deterministic dynamic game of T periods fixed duration. Three policy instruments...

The key role of technological change in the decline of energy and carbon intensities of aggregate economic activities is widely recognized. This has focused attention on the issue of developing endogenous models for the evolution of technological change. With a few exceptions this is done using...

In the policy debate, intellectual property is often justified by what seems to be a straightforward argument: if innovators are not protected against others appropriating their ideas, incentives for innovation are suboptimally low. Now in most industries for most potential users, appropriating...

Although market-based environmental policy instruments feature prominently in economic theory and are widely employed, they often meet with public resistance. We argue that such resistance may be driven by a feeling of moral responsibility where citizens prefer to tackle environmental problems...

In this paper, we consider a problem in environmental policy design by applying optimal stopping rules. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the optimal timings at which the government should adopt environmental policies to deal with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations and to reduce...