This study examined social system failures and sought to identify a plausible mechanism behind these failures. Stretched exponential distributions were observed for failure of marriages in the US, UK, and Germany. In addition, the study provides evidence of power laws in the failure of large...

Das auf Expansion beruhende sozio-technische Gesellschaftssystem ist nicht zukunftsfähig und bedarf einer grundlegenden Transformation zu einer kleineren Ökonomie mit geringerem Ressourcenverbrauch. Der notwendige Wandel erfordert eine Abkehr von wirtschaftlichem Wachstum als...

A simple model of yardstick competition between jurisdictions is presented. Governments of jurisdictions face the alternative to choose between an old and a new policy with stochastic payoffs. The new policy is superior to the old policy in one state of the world, and inferior in the other....

We examine the impact of public information on firms’ disclosure strategies. We portray two regimes based on a model that extends the setting of Dye (1985) and Jung and Kwon (1988). In the first regime, the firm is able to respond to public information and thus has the last word, and in the...

We study the environmental and economic effects of public abatement in the presence of multiple stable steady-state ecological equilibria. Under shallow-lake dynamics (SLD), the isocline for the stock of pollution features two stable branches, a good and a bad one. Assuming that the ecology is...

We analyze the costs and benefits of using social image to foster virtuous behavior. A Principal seeks to motivate reputation-conscious agents to supply a public good. Each agent chooses how much to contribute based on his own mix of public-spiritedness, private signal about the value of the...