Environmental regulation, multinational companies and international competitiveness

Concerns have been expressed that in a global market place with mobile capital, national governments will have incentives to set weak environmental policies (“environmental dumpingâ€) to protect the international competitiveness of their domestic firms, that these incentives are particularly strong in industries where plants may be relatively footloose, so that governments are concerned to prevent “capital flightâ€, and that footloose plants are particularly associated with multinational firms. It is then often suggested that appropriate policy responses would be to seek to harmonise environmental regulations or impose minimum standards for environmental regulations. In this paper we set out these concerns in terms of a number of more precisely made claims and then review recent developments in economic analysis (including some of our own work) and empirical evidence to show that the claims cannot be generally sustained and that the suggested policies may be harmful. However, devising more appropriate policies is by no means straightforward. Keywords; plant location, environmental policy, eco-dumping, competition JEL Classification: F1, H4, L5, Q2

Cycle frequency in standard Rock-Paper-Scissors games: Evidence from experimental economics

The Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) game is a widely used model system in game theory. Evolutionary game theory predicts the existence of persistent cycles in the evolutionary trajectories of the RPS game, but experimental evidence has remained to be rather weak. In this work we performed laboratory experiments on the RPS game and analyzed the social-state evolutionary trajectories of twelve populations of N=6 players. We found strong evidence supporting the existence of persistent cycles. The mean cycling frequency was measured to be $0.029 \pm 0.009$ period per experimental round. Our experimental observations can be quantitatively explained by a simple non-equilibrium model, namely the discrete-time logit dynamical process with a noise parameter. Our work therefore favors the evolutionary game theory over the classical game theory for describing the dynamical behavior of the RPS game.Comment: 7 Page, 3 figure; Keyword: Rock-Paper-Scissors game; cycle; social state; population dynamics; evolutionary trajector

Conservation and Optimal Use of Rangelands

In previous papers we have considered the optimal mix of biodiversity in semi-arid rangelands, focusing on the steady state. This paper addresses the question of conservation in the optimal use of rangelands. That is, it considers the optimal trajectory of biodiversity change. There are two issues involved in the question of timing. One is the uncertainty associated with the fact that many changes in the flora and fauna of rangelands are 'event-driven'. They depend on stochastic parameters taking particular values before a change of state can occur. A second issue relates to the lag structure of changes. In a system that involves a mix of fast and slow variables, in which the approach to the optimum is not 'most rapid', the optimal trajectory may require the system to remain in an apparently stable intermediate equilibrium for some time before it converges to the optimum state. The paper discusses the role of conservation in the optimal use of rangeland resources.Biodiversity, Rangelands

Essays on monetary and fiscal policy interaction:Applications to EMU and Eastern Europe

Abstract: The interaction of monetary and fiscal policies encompasses much research material and covers a respectable area in theoretical macroeconomics. In this broad research field, three different focuses are discernible. A first line of research studies the dynamic interdependence of monetary and fiscal policy due to the dynamic government budget constraint. The second approach concentrates on the interaction of fiscal and monetary policy regarding the stabilisation of output fluctuations. Finally, a large amount of literature exists on the "public finance view of inflation" which treats monetary policy as part of the tax system which the authorities operate. This Ph.D. thesis develops a number of applications of the theory of monetary and fiscal policy interaction in the context of EMU and transition in Eastern Europe. The first three chapters model the problem of government debt stabilisation in EMU as a dynamic conflict between the fiscal and monetary authorities. A fourth chapter studies output stabilisation in EMU and develops a transfer system to stabilise the effects of asymmetric shocks. The remaining chapters study the "public finance view of inflation" and develop applications with respect to the design of monetary policy in the economies in transition and developing countries.

Exploration-Exploitation in Multi-Agent Learning: Catastrophe Theory Meets Game Theory

Exploration-exploitation is a powerful and practical tool in multi-agent learning (MAL), however, its effects are far from understood. To make progress in this direction, we study a smooth analogue of Q-learning. We start by showing that our learning model has strong theoretical justification as an optimal model for studying exploration-exploitation. Specifically, we prove that smooth Q-learning has bounded regret in arbitrary games for a cost model that explicitly captures the balance between game and exploration costs and that it always converges to the set of quantal-response equilibria (QRE), the standard solution concept for games under bounded rationality, in weighted potential games with heterogeneous learning agents. In our main task, we then turn to measure the effect of exploration in collective system performance. We characterize the geometry of the QRE surface in low-dimensional MAL systems and link our findings with catastrophe (bifurcation) theory. In particular, as the exploration hyperparameter evolves over-time, the system undergoes phase transitions where the number and stability of equilibria can change radically given an infinitesimal change to the exploration parameter. Based on this, we provide a formal theoretical treatment of how tuning the exploration parameter can provably lead to equilibrium selection with both positive as well as negative (and potentially unbounded) effects to system performance.Comment: Appears in the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligenc