Dutch drinking water companies now deliver safe affordable water to the entire population, but this result was not planned. It emerged, rather, from an evolutionary process in which various pressures on the commons resulted in changes to drinking water systems that addressed old concerns but...

International aid travels from donor to recipient through a chain of middlemen. Middlemen play two roles: as agents delivering aid and as principals monitoring other middlemen delivering aid. As the quality of middlemen falls, shirking (theft) increases, and aid effectiveness falls. While...

Bilateral or multilateral organizations control about 90% of official overseas development assistance (ODA), much of which is wasted. This note traces aid failure to the daisy chain of principal-agent-beneficiary relationships linking rich donors to aid bureaucrats to poor recipients. Waste...

Economic theories and tools provide only partial insight into the many complexities affecting various uses and flows of water. To usefully teach water economics, it is therefore necessary to understand and cooperate with other disciplines. Many economic concepts can be used to understand...

In 1992, Amsterdam's voters pushed for a more-aggressive autoluw (`nearly car free'') policy, but progress has been slow. Hourly parking tariffs are the highest in the country, but more cars than ever park in Amsterdam. We explore this promise-results gap in a spatial comparison of the price of...

This modeling project examines the short-run effects of a program wherein the United States becomes the primary buyer of opium produced in Afghanistan and thereby reduces the global supply of heroin (refined opium). The model graphically shows that supply-side intervention will result in a large...

This paper analyzes economic forces in Nepal's tourism market. Market actors' utility maximization results in inefficient supply and demand outcomes and unsustainable ecotourism. This result is in direct contradiction to the stated goals of the actors, but predictable in the context of the...

This paper has been published in two parts in the The Economics of Peace and Security Journal (1) "Intra-organizational conflict: origin and cost" tells the story of an organization -- the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California -- that suffers from internal conflict. The story is...

Our non-representative sample of 245 undergraduates had significantly lower scores on questions presented in the standard heterogeneous form (i.e., Direct Demand equation and Inverse Demand graph) than on questions presented in non-standard homogenous forms. This result, which holds for advanced...