Modern tools for cost-effective conservation reserve site planning require the planner to have information about spatial distributions of conservation costs and benefits. Climate change creates unprecedented uncertainty about future land values and species habitat ranges, such that conservation...

We analyze a dynamic and stochastic ecological-economic model of grazing management in semi-arid rangelands. The ecosystem is driven by stochastic precipitation. A risk averse farmer chooses a grazing management strategy under uncertainty such as to maximize expected utility from farming income....

In the search for effective pesticide risk management tools, the design of pesticide risk indicators is nowadays receiving increasing attention as a complement to more established regulatory strategies. In the present paper, we apply some recently developed pesticide risk indices and test their...

The gap between willingness-to-pay (WTP) and willingness-to-accept (WTA) benefit values typifies situations in which reference points — and direction of movement from reference points — are consequential. Why WTA-WTP discrepancies arise is not well understood. We generalize models of...

The 1990s were designated as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. Yet, almost ten years after the close of that decade, many issues remain unresolved about the nature of disasters and their impact on human beings, other life forms and the natural environment. There is the...

We discuss the selection of the socially optimal discount rate for public investment projects that entail costs and benefits in the very long run. More specifically, we examine in an expected utility framework how the uncertainty on the growth rate of the GNP per head affects this rate. Under...

We consider the problem of the optimal use of a good whose consumption can produce damages in the future. Scientific progress is made over time that provides information on the distribution of the intensity of damages. We show that this progress induces earlier prevention effort only if prudence...

A group of decision makers simultaneously make contributions towards a green fund that reduces the future probability of a climate catastrophe. We derive the theoretical predictions of the effects on contributions arising from 'behavioral parameters' such as loss aversion and present-bias;...