Are international environmental agreements stable ex-post?

In this paper we present a model of international environmental agreements in the presence of threshold effects. The model is in the tradition of models of international environmental agreements formulated as games in partition function form. Games in partition function form allow the incorporation of external effects between players. The model is applied to global climate change agreements. The agreement involves a contract between nations as to the level of abatement of greenhouse gas emissions and how these benefits are to be shared. Benefits to emissions abatement are subject to a threshold. Consequently, we model climate as a global threshold public good. This allows a mechanism to explore incentives and disincentives for signing agreements consequent to a critical number of other players committing to an agreement. We show that thresholds may destabilize what would be an otherwise stable agreement and that combining an emissions tax with an international agreement can be used to restore stability.International environmental agreements; threshold public good; gamma core, global warming and emissions taxation

DOMESTIC AND TRADE POLICY FOR CENTRAL AND EAST EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE

International Relations/Trade,

Supply chain collaboration

In the past, research in operations management focused on single-firm analysis. Its goal was to provide managers in practice with suitable tools to improve the performance of their firm by calculating optimal inventory quantities, among others. Nowadays, business decisions are dominated by the globalization of markets and increased competition among firms. Further, more and more products reach the customer through supply chains that are composed of independent firms. Following these trends, research in operations management has shifted its focus from single-firm analysis to multi-firm analysis, in particular to improving the efficiency and performance of supply chains under decentralized control. The main characteristics of such chains are that the firms in the chain are independent actors who try to optimize their individual objectives, and that the decisions taken by a firm do also affect the performance of the other parties in the supply chain. These interactions among firms’ decisions ask for alignment and coordination of actions. Therefore, game theory, the study of situations of cooperation or conflict among heterogenous actors, is very well suited to deal with these interactions. This has been recognized by researchers in the field, since there are an ever increasing number of papers that applies tools, methods and models from game theory to supply chain problems

Product Market Integration and Income Taxation: Distortions and Gains from Trade

It is widely perceived that globalization is a threat to tax financed public sector activities. The argument is that public activities (public consumption and transfers) financed by income taxes may distort labour markets and cause higher wages and thus a loss of competitiveness. If the importance of the latter effect is reinforced by globalization, it is inferred that the marginal costs of public funds increase and a retrenchment of the public sector follows. We consider this issue in a Ricardian trade model in which production and specialization structures are endogenous. Even though income taxation unambiguously worsens wage competitiveness, it does not follow that tax distortions or marginal costs of public funds increase with product market integration. The reason is that gains from trade tend to reduce both. Moreover, non-cooperative fiscal policies do not have a bias towards retrenchment due to a positive terms of trade effect from taxation.labour taxation, open economy, policy spill-over, marginal costs of public funds

Incentives and justice for sequencing problems.

We address the mechanism design issue for the sequencing problem. We identify the just sequencing rule that serves the agents in the non-increasing order of their waiting costs and prove that it is a Rawlsian rule. We identify all rVCG mechanisms that implement the just sequencing rule. The other properties of the just sequencing rule that we identify are the following. It is an affine cost minimizer. It can be implemented with budget balanced rVCG mechanisms. Finally, when waiting cost and processing time are private information, we identify all generalized rVCG mechanisms that ex-post implement the just sequencing rule

Incentives and justice for sequencing problems.

We address the mechanism design issue for the sequencing problem. We identify the just sequencing rule that serves the agents in the non-increasing order of their waiting costs and prove that it is a Rawlsian rule. We identify all rVCG mechanisms that implement the just sequencing rule. The other properties of the just sequencing rule that we identify are the following. It is an affine cost minimizer. It can be implemented with budget balanced rVCG mechanisms. Finally, when waiting cost and processing time are private information, we identify all generalized rVCG mechanisms that ex-post implement the just sequencing rule