We experimentally test a theoretically promising amendment to the ratchet-up mechanism of the Paris Agreement. The ratchet-up mechanism prescribes that parties’ commitments to the global response to climate change cannot decrease over time and our results confirm that its effect is...

Public good games in coalitional form, such as the ones depicting international environmental agreements for the reduction of a global pollutant, generally foresee scarce levels of cooperation. The incentive to free ride, that increases for higher levels of cooperation, prevents the formation of...

We investigate the optimal regulation of energy production reflecting the long-term goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. We analyze the optimal regulatory incentives to foster the development of non-emissive electricity generation when the demand for power is served either by a monopoly or by...

We consider a simple contest game with draws where with some probability none of the contestants is selected as winner. If such an outcome occurs, then the contest is repeated in the next period unless either one of the contestants wins the prize or until a final last period is reached. Allowing...

We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule "imitate-the-best" can hardly be beaten by any other decision rule. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable and show that it can only be beaten by much in games that are of...

It is well known that the rock-paper-scissors game has no pure saddle point. We show that this holds more generally: A symmetric two-player zero-sum game has a pure saddle point if and only if it is not a generalized rock-paper-scissors game. Moreover, we show that every finite symmetric...

This paper asks whether population growth is conducive to the sustainability of cooperation. A simple model is developed in which farmers who live around a circular lake engage in trade with their adjacent neighbors. The payoffs from this activity are governed by a prisoner's dilemma "rule of...

We study strategic interfirm competition allowing for internal conflicts in each seller firm. Intrafirm conflicts are captured by a multi-agent framework with principals implementing a revenue sharing scheme. For a given number of agents, interfirm competition leads to a higher revenue share for...

The beauty contest game has been used to analyze how many steps of reasoning subjects are able to perform. A common finding is that a majority seem to have low levels of reasoning. We use eye-tracking to investigate not only the number chosen in the game, but also the strategies in use and the...