This paper develops a theory of the endogenous formation of a common market in a three–country, n factor political economy model. Ex ante policies in each of the prospective members are the result of direct democracy, and equilibrium outcomes may include both import restrictions as well as subsidies. The decision to join a common market is modelled as a simultaneous move game between the two pr...

Background and aim The paper focuses on the methodology for assessing Sustainable Mobility (SM) at the neighbourhood scale, and pays attention to two different ex-ante evaluation approaches: the Multicriteria Analysis (MCA) and the Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA). If MCA is an acknowledged technique for the assessment of sustainability at neighbourhood level, CBA is mainly used for infrastructure a...

At one time, JEAB editorial policy was perceived by some to consist mainly of dogmatically enforcing a Skinnerian interpretation of all findings reported in the journal. Partly in response to that undeserved reputation, the journal explicitly defined itself as the place to publish research on the behavior of individual organisms, and not as a place that encourages any particular theoretical ori...

This paper aims at clarifying some conceptual flaws blurring the equity-efficiency debates involved in the setting of objectives of GHGs emissions control beyond 2012. To this end, it carries out numerical experiments that test the viability of agreements grounded on two contrasting target allocation rules: a “Soft Landing” rule prolonging a Kyoto-type agreement; and a “Convergence” rule progre...

This paper develops a novel positive model of informal contracting in which rewards and punishments are not determined by an ex ante optimal plan but instead express the ex post moral sentiments of the arbitrating party. We consider a subjective performance evaluation problem in which a principal can privately assess the contribution of an agent to the welfare of a broader group. In the absence...

Environmental policies employ metaphoric objectives such as ecosystem health, resilience and sustainable provision of ecosystem services, which influence corresponding sustainability assessments by means of normative settings such as assumptions on system description, indicator selection, aggregation of information and target setting. A heuristic approach is developed for sustainability assessm...

Social media analytics is showing promise for the prediction of financial markets. However, the true value of such data for trading is unclear due to a lack of consensus on which instruments can be predicted and how. Current approaches are based on the evaluation of message volumes and are typically assessed via retrospective (ex-post facto) evaluation of trading strategy returns. In this paper...