Over the past several years, environmental economists have been increasingly attracted to the use of information as an alternative to traditional methods for regulating externalities. An example of this approach is "eco-labeling," where a third party certifies firms' products; this approach is...

As addressing climate change becomes a high priority it seems likely that there will be a surge in interest in deploying nuclear power. Other fuel bases are too dirty (coal), too expensive (oil, natural gas) or too speculative (solar, wind) to completely supply the energy needs of the global...

In the past decade, innovations in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have fueled a boom in the production of natural gas (as well as oil) from geological formations — primarily deep shales — in which hydrocarbon production was previously unprofitable. Impacts on US fossil fuel...

Persistent and significant privately-held stockpiles of crude oil have long been an important empirical regularity in the United States. Such stockpiles would not rationally be held in a traditional Hotelling-style model. How then can the existence of these inventories be explained? In the...

We conduct economic experiments to gauge the level of cooperation between conglomerate rivals. First we run control experiments to observe cooperation between subjects acting as duopolists in one of two markets. In the control experiments, subject pairs choose a quantity xi (or yi) from a payoff...

Cooperative equilibria can be supported in a repeated game when players use trigger strategies. This paper tests how well trigger strategies explain behavior in two-person experimental games. Reducing payoffs for choices larger than the Cournot level induces smaller average outputs, behavior...

For a number of animal species, speculators are betting on future price increases by holding large stockpiles of commodities from the animal. We develop a model to explain this behavior. We derive conditions where it can be optimal for a speculator to induce poachers to harvest so rapidly as to...