Implementing a project, like a nationwide nuclear waste disposal, which benefits all involved agents but brings major costs only to the host is often problematic. In practice, revelation issues and redistributional concerns are significant obstacles to achieving stable agreements. We address...

The management of natural commons is typically subject to threshold effects: past a certain agregate consumption level, the benefits of the commons will be lost for everybody. As dealing with the global climate illustrates, moreover, it is often impossible to locate an actual threshold with...

We show that inequality triggers social unrest in rural India. We develop a theoretical framework where social unrest is rationally used by civilians to oppose (unfair) surplus sharing by the elite. We predict that the probability of observing social unrest in a village increases with the sum of...

It has long been recognized that the quality of property rights greatly impacts the economic development of a country and the use of its natural resources. Since Long (1975), the conventional wisdom has been that ownership risk induces a firm to overuse the stock of a resource. However, the...

Implementing a project, like a nationwide nuclear waste disposal, which benefits all involved agents but brings major costs only to the host is often problematic. In practice, revelation issues and redistributional concerns are significant obstacles to achieving stable agreements. We address...

The siting of public facilities, such as prisons, airports or incinerators for hazardous waste typically faces social rejection by local populations (the "NIMBY" syndrome, for Not In My BackYard). These public goods exhibit a private bad aspect which creates an asymmetry: all involved...

Allocating property rights on an open access resource which has been freely exploited in the past is often very problematic. Involved agents typically rely on one of two competing principles to determine future allocation. The first priority principle, "first in time, first in rights" favors the...