As a quintessential long-term policy problem, climate change poses two major challenges. The first is to develop, under considerable uncertainty, a plan for allocating resources over time to achieve an effective policy response. The second is to implement this plan, once arrived at, consistently...

One of the proposed alternatives to Kyoto’s cap-and-trade approach is a regime based on an internationally harmonized carbon tax. In this paper, we consider and compare the enforcement problems associated with a tax regime and a cap-and-trade regime, respectively. The paper tries to convey two...

Arild Underdal's work on the Law of the Least Ambitious Program (LLAP) is a significant contribution to our understanding of the logic of international collaboration. The LLAP, however, applies only under particular conditions. After comparing the law to the joint decision trap and the veto...

In international regimes research, one of the most important questions is how effective regimes are in delivering what they were established and designed to achieve. Perhaps the most explicit and rigorous formula for measuring regime effectiveness is the so-called Oslo-Potsdam solution. This...

The notion of renegotiation-proof equilibrium has become a cornerstone in non-cooperative models of international environmental agreements. Applying this solution concept to the infinitely repeated N-person Prisoners' Dilemma generates predictions that contradict intuition as well as...

The United States, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is not going to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in the foreseeable future. Yet, a number of countries have decided to stay on the Kyoto track. Four main explanations for this apparent puzzle are considered. The first is that remaining...

We provide experimental evidence of self-serving fairness ideals in a dictator game design that includes treatments where funds can be transferred in two ways to the one player and in one way to the other. Two methods for transferring funds to the recipient produce the same results as the...

Elected representatives serving their final period face only weak incentives to provide costly effort. However, overlapping generations (OLG) models suggest that exit prizes sustained by trigger strategies can induce representatives in their final period to provide such effort. We evaluate this...