This paper studies the formation of international climate coalitions by heterogeneous countries. Countries rationally predict the consequences of their membership decisions in climate negotiations. We offer an approach to characterise the equilibrium number of coalitions and their number of...

This article explores four questions. First, what theoretical frameworks help describe policy failure and success? Second, how might the decision that leads to failure or success be understood in terms of differing concepts of rationality and decisionmaking? Third, how does the discussion of...

Climate change is likely to trigger abrupt and potentially persistent changes in the structure and function of marine ecosystems. Such ‘regime shifts' threaten the livelihoods of millions of people reliant on small-scale fisheries. Yet, it is largely unknown how resource users cope with regime...

Cooperation is thought to be a necessary condition to solve collective dilemmas such as climate change or the sustainable use of common-pool resources. Yet, it is poorly understood how situations pervaded by thresholds shape the behaviour of people facing collective dilemmas. Here we provide...

This study explains aspects and strategies of critical decision in crisis management. Critical decisions enable organizations to cope with consequential environmental threats or take advantage of important opportunities in the presence of highly restricted time. In particular, critical decisions...

Several recent studies find that interventions in schools can have important lasting consequences for students, and that schools differ in their contribution to students’ learning. However, there is less research investigating how these differences between schools influence longer-term...

Over the past century, all OECD countries have been characterized by a dramatic increase in economic conditions, life expectancy and educational attainment. This paper provides a positive theory that explains how an economy might evolve when the longevity of its citizens both influences and is...

Consider a population of citizens uniformly spread over the entire plane, that faces a problem of locating public facilities to be used by its members. The cost of every facility is financed by its users, who also face an idiosyncratic private access cost to the facility. We assume that the...

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line...

A collective decision problem is described by a set of agents, a profile of single-peaked preferences over the real line and a number k of public facilities to be located. We consider public facilities that do not suffer from congestion and are non-excludable. We provide a characterization of...