(Self-) Enforcement of Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism Contracts

International climate protection investments (Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism projects) are burdened with problems of contract enforcement, which prevent the realisation of efficiency gains associated with these investments. The paper analyses this problem from the perspective of non-cooperative game theory and proposes two different solutions to the co-operation problem. The first analyses the potential role of national environmental authorities in facilitating credible commitment of the project host operating under its jurisdiction. It is argued that the threat of punishing the project host if he breaches the contract may serve this purpose. The effective level of punishment is derived. The second option involves strategic delegation of contract implementation to a third party operating under the same jurisdiction as the project host. Again, the paper explores the conditions that ensure incentive-compatibility. Both options are based on the idea that the project sponsor may commit himself credibly by becoming a Stackelberg leader.Joint Implementation, Clean Development Mechanism, climate protection, international environmental agreements, international investments, contract enforcement, co-operation, incentive compatibility

Social capital, transition in agriculture, and economic organisation: a theoretical perspective

Social capital is defined as the shared knowledge, trust, and culture, embodied in the structural forms of networks and other stable inter-agent relationships. Social capital has been shown to be more difficult to build than economic capital, and to have greater beneficial effects for community as a whole. The relevance of the social capital concept for transitional agenda is explained by the increasing responsibility of private collective action and grass-roots decisions in managing the business activities in agriculture, since this is required by the more democratic foundations of the market economy. Different forms of business organisations are shown to be differentially but consistently associated with social capital, with the major social capital dependent organisational form being the cooperative. The growing complexity of inter-agent relations (particularly in transitional context) causes the increasing amount of economic responsibility being transferred from authority-based to social capital-based forms of economic organisation, i.e. from markets and hierarchies, based mainly on economic capital, to networks with their primary accent on social capital. The social capital-based organisation in agriculture is particularly important in view of its industry-specific limitations and is represented mainly by cooperatives and farmers associations. The optimal role of the government is to invest in social capital in order to enable rural communities to solve their problems by means of private collective action (self-organisation), rather than attempt to substitute the latter. -- G E R M A N V E R S I O N: Sozialkapital wird definiert als geteiltes Wissen, Vertrauen und gemeinsame Kultur, eingebettet in Netzwerkstrukturen und andere stabile Beziehungen zwischen Agenten. Es hat sich gezeigt, dass Sozialkapital schwieriger aufzubauen ist als ökonomisches Kapital und dass es größere Auswirkungen auf die Gemeinschaft als Ganzes hat. Die Relevanz des Sozialkapital-Konzeptes für die Agenda der Transformationsländer wird erklärt durch die wachsende Verantwortung von privaten, kollektiven Handlungen und Basisentscheidungen beim landwirtschaftlichen Betriebsmanagement, wie es für die demokratischen Strukturen der Marktwirtschaft erforderlich ist. Verschiedene Betriebsformen sind unterschiedlich, jedoch durchweg verbunden mit Sozialkapital. Die landwirtschaftlichen Produktionsgenossen-schaften erweisen sich dabei als am meisten abhängig von Sozialkapital. Die wachsende Komplexität der Inter-Agenten-Beziehungen (insbesondere im Kontext des Transformationsprozesses) bewirkt, dass ein steigender Anteil ökonomischer Verantwortung von autoritätsbasierten zu sozialkapital-basierten Organisationsformen übergeht, d. h. von Märkten und Hierarchien, die vor allem auf ökonomischen Kapital basieren, zu Netzwerken mit dem Schwerpunkt auf Sozialkapital. Die sozialkapitalbasierten Organisationen in der Landwirtschaft werden hauptsächlich durch Genossenschaften und Bauernverbände repräsentiert und sind besonders wichtig in Hinblick auf ihre industriespezifischen Beschränkungen. Politische Maßnahmen sollten Investitionen in Sozialkapital unterstützen, um ländliche Gemeinden zu befähigen, ihre Probleme durch private, kollektive Handlungen (Selbstorganisation), anstatt zu versuchen, diese zu ersetzen.social capital,agricultural cooperative,economic organisation,Sozialkapital,Agrargenossenschaft,ökonomische Organisation

Modelling the effect of learning and evolving rules on the use of common-pool resources

The extend to which common-pool resources are used and managed sustainably depends highly on incentives. Incentives influence the behaviour of individuals with respect to natural resource management and are determined by institutional arrangements comprising of formal and informal rules and markets. Changes in institutional arrangements will affect individual incentives and will therefore have an impact on resource use. In order to model the connections between institutional arrangements and the sustainable use of common-pool resources we must take into consideration the behaviour of individuals. Game-theoretical models appear to be an adequate modelling technique with which to assess the behaviour of individuals as well as the development of institutions with regards to common-pool resource regimes. The implementation of a game-theoretical framework in the form of an agent-based model appears to be a particularly appropriate tool with which to assess common-pool resource use regimes as such models enable the behaviour of different agents to be modelled as strategies. Traditionally with agent-based models, the strategies that agents pursue are given, with their expression endogenously determined by the set of rules which govern their behaviour. In this paper I focus on the implementation of mechanisms that also allow for rules to adapt endogenously. Such an approach will be applied to common-pool resource use in order to analyse the effect of rule changes.Institutional arrangements, agent-based modelling, learning, evolving rules

Partner selection supports reputation-based cooperation in a Public Goods Game

In dyadic models of indirect reciprocity, the receivers' history of giving has a significant impact on the donor's decision. When the interaction involves more than two agents things become more complicated, and in large groups cooperation can hardly emerge. In this work we use a Public Goods Game to investigate whether publicly available reputation scores may support the evolution of cooperation and whether this is affected by the kind of network structure adopted. Moreover, if agents interact on a bipartite graph with partner selection cooperation can thrive in large groups and in a small amount of time.Comment: 6 pages, 10 figures. In press for Springer E

Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective

This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective