The paper explores the prospects for international environmental cooperation in a context of limited enforcement, if we allow for side-payments between countries and sequential moves in the implementation of the agreement. The framework of the analysis is a static model of heterogenous countries...

We analyze and evaluate the different decision rules describing the Council of Ministers of the EU starting from 1958 up to date. Most of the existing studies use the Banzhaf index (for binary voting) or the Shapley-Shubik index (for distributive politics). We argue in favor of the nucleolus as...

Global games of regime change – coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attacks it – have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks, bank runs, debt crises, and political change. We extend...

We use a simple balanced budget contest to collect taxes on a private good in order to finance a pure public good. We show that-with an appropriately chosen structure of winning probabilities-this contest can provide the public good efficiently and without distorting private consumption. We...

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 as...

Strategies of international risk management, as the implementation of tradable emission permits, feed back to the incentive structure of a treaty, like the Kyoto Protocol. Discussing the Kyoto Protocol the question was: Should there be any restrictions on the trading of emission permits or not?...