This draft PhD thesis analyzes four issues in the research field that consists of the intersection of environmental economics, uncertainty, and decision-making. 1. Economic investments that lead to environmental damages beyond repair - like cutting rainforests or emitting pollutants with long...

We introduce a new class of cooperative games where the worth of a coalition depends on the behavior of other players and on the state of nature as well. We allow for coalitions to form both before and after the resolution of uncertainty, hence agreements must be stable against both types of...

How are contracts formed when agents face uncertainty, have asymmetric information and cannot write binding agreements? In this paper we propose a solution to this problem. Agents can discuss state-contingent allocations but cannot write binding contracts. At any stage in the contract formation...

The paper proposes a novel way to handle the relation between decision theory and uncertainty in the context of policy design. Present risk governance is based primarily on two institutions - insurance markets and public risk governance - supported by a powerful theory: the expected utility...

This paper examines how cooperation in an insurance game depends on risk preferences and the riskiness of income. It considers a dynamic game where commitment is limited, and characterizes the level of cooperation as measured by the reciprocal of the discount factor above which perfect risk...

We examine how policy uncertainty affects firm innovation and competitive dynamism. In R&D races, the gap in the rate of innovation, rather than the absolute rate, determines the winner. As a result, periods of depressed innovation and investment from policy uncertainty present an opportune...

We consider the effect of an increase in the risk from pollution. We show that in the case of a flow pollution, when the number of players is sufficiently large, the result of Bramoulle and Treich, showing that a marginal increase of risk in the neighborhood of a risk-free world is...

The law of association as exposed by David Ricardo and generalized by Ludwig von Mises cannot directly grasp what is at stake in exchanges involving specialization in uncertainty bearing. In this article we explain why the entrepreneurial function as conceptualized by Frank Knight and Mises does...

We worked with two microlenders to test impacts of randomly assigned reminders for loan repayments in the "text messaging capital of the world". We do not find strong evidence that loss versus gain framing or messaging timing matter. Messages only robustly improve repayment when they include the...

We study informal insurance within communities, explicitly recognizing the possibility that subgroups of individuals may destabilize insurance arrangements among the larger group. We therefore consider self-enforcing risk-sharing agreements that are robust not only to single-person deviations...