Without regulation or agreement, public goods are underprovided and public bads are overprovided. Both problems are usually seen as flip sides of the same coin. In this paper we examine a situation where a public good is good for some agents but bad for others, and this preference is endogenous...

Land subsidence threatens the living conditions of roughly 1.2 billion people worldwide in deltaic regions characterized by soft top soil. Economic activity in deltaic regions requires lowering the groundwater levels to keep the land sufficiently dry to maintain productivity, which, however,...

Previous work on the formation and stability of cartels has focused on the case of identical players. This assumption is very restrictive in many economic environments. This paper analyses stability of cartels in games with heterogeneous players and spillovers to non-members. I introduce a...

The concepts of food deficit, hunger, undernourishment and food security are discussed. Axioms and indices for the assessment of nutrition of individuals and groups are suggested. Furthermore a measure for food aid donor performance is developed and applied to a sample of bilateral and...

Of Rawls's two principles of justice only the second has received attention from economists. The second principle is concerned with the social and economic conditions in a just society. The first principle, however, has largely been neglected. It claims, that all people in society should have...

The paper is an enquiry into dynamic social contract theory. The social contract defines the rules of resource use. An intergenerational social contract in an economy with a single exhaustible resource is examined within a framework of an overlapping generations model. It is assumed that new...

In modern political philosophy social contract theory is the most prominent approach to individual rights and fair institutions. According to social contract theory the system of rights in a society ought to be justified by reconstructing its basic features as a contract between the mutually...