Thinking about tipping provides a novel perspective on finding a way forward in climate negotiations and suggests an alternative to the current framework of negotiating a global agreement on reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Recent work on non-cooperative games shows games with increasing...

The article addresses the question of whether responsibility for pollution created in the past should be retroactively applied to firms, or if the costs of cleaning up existing pollution should be financed by the public. We show that making firms liable for retrospective environmental costs can...

Thinking about tipping provides a novel perspective on finding a way forward in climate negotiations and suggests an alternative to the current framework of negotiating a global agreement on reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Recent work on non-cooperative games shows games with increasing...

Although anti-terrorism policy should be based on a normative treatment of risk that incorporates likelihoods of attack, policy makers’ anti-terror decisions may be influenced by the blame they expect from failing to prevent attacks. We show that people’s anti-terror budget priorities before...

Do firms have adequate incentives to invest in anti-terrorism mechanisms? This paper develops a framework for addressing this issue when the security choices by one agent affect the risks faced by others. We utilize the airline security problem to illustrate how the incentive by one airline to...

Individuals often make decisions that affect groups, yet the propensities of group representatives are not as well understood than those of independent decision makers or deliberating groups. We ask how responsibility for group payoffs − in the absence of group deliberation − affects the...

Policy-makers often rely on public opinion polls to decide which political projects to pursue. We study how the use of opinion polls influences policy outcomes if respondents feel pressured to offer "socially desirable" views when answering the pollster's questions. Our results indicate that...

Utilizing theory and empirical insights from psychology and behavioral economics, this paper examines individuals’ cognitive and motivational barriers to adopting climate change adaptation and mitigation measures that increase consumer welfare. We then propose strategies that take into account...

The actions of different agents sometimes reinforce each other. Examples are network effects and the threshold models used by sociologists as well as Harvey Leibensteins's "bandwagon effects." We model such situations as a game with increasing differences, and show that tipping of equilibria,...