Emotions, Sanctions and Cooperation We use skin conductance responses and self-reports of hedonic valence to study the emotional basis of cooperation and punishment in a social dilemma. Emotional reaction to free-riding incites individuals to apply sanctions when they are available. The application of sanctions activates a “virtuous emotional circle” that accompanies cooperation. Emotionally ar...

In order not to see their climate mitigation efforts be in vain by the unlimited growth in China and India, the developed world has started to consider imposing border tax adjustments on imports from these fast developing countries. This paper puts this problem into a game-theoretic perspective. It sets up the problem as a game between the developed world deciding on three regimes of border tax...

Two agents jointly operate a decreasing marginal returns technology to produce a private good. We characterize the class of output-sharing rules for which the labor-supply game has a unique Nash equilibrium. It consists of two families: rules of the serial type which protect a small user from the negative externality imposed by a large user, and rules of the reverse serial type, where one agent...

This paper provides a discussion of the principles of environmental taxation. It considers the empirical identification of environmental taxes and the problems associated with the choice of the right tax base from the point of view of the correction of market incentives. It then presents a model of optimal second best environmental taxation when taxes must fulfil the double role of modifying ma...

Many renewable resources are in intergenerational common pools, exploited by one generation after another. In our experiment, the stock available to each generation depends on the extent of exploitation by previous generations and on resource’s growth rate, which is either ‘‘slow’’ or ‘‘fast.’’ Subjects show altruistic restraint in exploitation, but not enough to achieve the social optimum. The...

Uncertainty and learning play an important role in addressing the problem of climate change. In stylized game-theoretic models of international environmental treaty formation, which capture the strategic interactions between nations, it has been shown that learning usually has a negative impact on the success of cooperation. This paper asks the question whether this negative conclusion carries ...

We take a differential game approach to study the dynamic market interaction between two Internet Service Providers (ISP) offering services characterized by different quality levels. Web congestion is accounted for, consisting in the fact that for a given network capacity, i.e. for given amount of resources to be shared, the quality of services decreases with the number of customers. ISP firms,...

We present a non-cooperative model of a family’s time allocation between work and a home-produced public good, and examine whether the income tax should apply to couples or individuals. While tax-induced labor supply distortions lead to overprovision of the public good, spouses’ failure to internalize the collective effect of their choices points towards underprovision. A large parameter range ...

Every day people face waiting time in queues when going to the grocery store, checking in at the airport or leaving the stadium parking lot after a sports event. Often the facility where they are waiting for service will open at a specific time, and the agents will most likely be serviced in order of arrival using the first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue discipline. In this paper we consider a game ...

Protein denaturation is considered to be the main reason for both water loss and textural changes in fish during thermal processing. Denaturation of proteins in muscle of farmed Atlantic cod was studied by differential scanning calorimetry. The denaturation of the proteins was compared to cook loss and loss in water holding capacity and it was shown that the protein denaturation occurs in a low...