A leading approach to understanding significant discrepancies between observed willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) in policy evaluation is the “endowment effect” — that preferences are based on a reference point or anchor that leads WTA to exceed WTP. Unlike assertions...

Prizes are receiving increasing attention in policy and entrepreneurial communities as means to promote innovation, but their distinguishing features remain inadequately understood. Models of patents treat winning a patent as winning a prize; other models distinguish prizes primarily as public...

Among the many complex issues of technology, governance, and market design affecting the electricity sector, climate policy has become dominant. From the perspective of a nonspecialist looking at this changing dominance, a quiz illuminates some of the peculiar uses of language one can find in...

Energy efficiency — using less energy to provide an equivalent level of service — is part of the climate policy portfolio. Market failures might warrant encouraging energy efficiency, but an important justification comes from the realm of behavioral economics: that people erroneously...