COMMON-PROPERTY RESOURCE USE AND OUTSIDE OPTIONS: COOPERATION ACROSS GENERATIONS IN A DYNAMIC GAME

This paper presents a noncooperative dynamic game with overlapping generations of players using a common-property natural resource, and identifies conditions under which cooperation is supported as an equilibrium of the game. It explores how heterogeneity among the resource users and access to outside markets or microcredit affect local resource use in developing countries.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

INTERTEMPORAL PERMIT TRADING FOR STOCK POLLUTANTS WITH UNCERTAINTY

This paper explores the efficiency of tradable permit markets for stock pollutants. With uncertainty about the future stock level or damages, a market with banking and borrowing is inferior, in terms of efficiency, compared to a market without banking and borrowing if the regulator commits to an initial allocation of permits. This result occurs because, with banking and borrowing and commitment, the regulator needs to specify the total allowable amount of emission over time at the initial time period before the uncertainty with the pollution stock is resolved. An alternative banking and borrowing scheme is proposed, where the regulator can update the allocation of permits to firms over time and achieve the efficient pollution accumulation.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Governing the Resource: Scarcity-Induced Institutional Change

We provide a dynamic model of natural resource management where the optimal institutional structure that governs resource use changes with resource depletion. Copeland and Taylor (2009) analyze how characteristics of a natural resource determine whether its steady-state management regime is open access, communal property, or private property. We extend this and other studies of endogenous institutions to analyze how and when resource governance may change in transition to the steady state, taking into account the fixed costs of institutional change and the variable costs of enforcement and governance. Assuming that governance cost is increasing in the difference between open-access and the actual harvest, we show that open access can be optimal if the resource is abundant relative to its demand and/or if governance costs are high. Once open access is rendered inefficient due to increased resource scarcity, further depletion warrants institutional change. In the face of set-up costs, optimal governance implies non-monotonic resource dynamics. These findings help to explain the co-evolution of resource scarcity and property rights—from open access to common property and beyond. We also extend the Demsetz/Copeland-Taylor theory of price-induced institutional change to include changing scarcity during the transition to the steady state.

ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION WITH INNOVATION AND LEARNING: RULES VERSUS DISCRETION

We analyze a model of environmental regulation with learning about environmental damages and endogenous choice of emissions abatement technology by a polluting firm. We compare environmental policy under discretion, in which policy is updated upon learning new information, versus under rules, in which policy is not updated. When investment in abatement technology is made prior to the resolution of uncertainty, neither discretion nor rules with either taxes or standards achieve an efficient solution. When there is little uncertainty, rules are superior to discretion because discretionary policy gives the firm an incentive to distort investment in order to influence future regulation. However, when uncertainty is large, discretion is superior to rules because it allows regulation to incorporate new information. Under discretionary policy, taxes are superior to standards regardless of the relative slopes of marginal costs and marginal damages.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Technology diffusion, abatement cost, and transboundary pollution

This paper studies countries’ incentives to develop advanced pollution abatement technology when technology may spillover across countries and pollution abatement is a global public good. We are motivated in part by the problem of global warming: a solution to this involves providing a global public good, and will surely require the development and implementation of new technologies. We show that at the Nash equilibrium of a simultaneous-move game with R&D investment and emission abatement, whether the free rider effect prevails and under-investment and excess emissions occur depends on the degree of technology spillovers and the effect of R&D on the marginal abatement costs. There are cases in which, contrary to conventional wisdom, Nash equilibrium investments in emissions reductions exceed the first-best case.International environmental agreement; pollution abatement costs; endogenous technological change.

Felt garments

This series of garments is my conception of art and fashion. By using different approaches to fiber, I wanted to make each garment unique; giving it its own life and character. By continuously challenging art and fashion, I hope to establish a new category for functional fiber pieces in art. In order to accomplish this goal, felt was selected as my main medium. Felt is a unwoven fabric made from wool. It can be shaped into any form, and mixed with different materials. Out of this flexible medium, I wanted to make garments which were like three-dimensional fiber forms rather than wearable clothing

Cooperation in the Commons with Unobservable Actions

We model a dynamic common property resource game with unobservable actions and non-linear stock dependent costs. We propose a strategy profile that generates a worst perfect equilibrium in the punishment phase, thereby supporting cooperation under the widest set of conditions. We show under what set of parameter values for the discount rate, resource growth rate, harvest price, and the number of resource users, this strategy supports cooperation in the commons as a subgame perfect equilibrium. The strategy profile that we propose, which involves harsh punishment after a defection followed by forgiveness, is consistent with human behavior observed in experiments and common property resource case studies.Common property resource, cooperation, dynamic game, unobservable actions

Payment schemes in random-termination experimental games

We consider payment schemes in experiments that model infinite-horizon games by using random termination. We compare paying subjects cumulatively for all periods of the game; with paying subjects for the last period only; with paying for one of the periods, chosen randomly. Theoretically, assuming expected utility maximization and risk neutrality, both the cumulative and the last-period payment schemes induce preferences that are equivalent to maximizing the discounted sum of utilities. The last-period payment is also robust under different attitudes towards risk. In comparison, paying subjects for one of the periods chosen randomly creates a present-period bias. Experimentally, we find that the cumulative payment appears the best in inducing long-sighted behavior.economic experiments; infinite-horizon games; random termination

‘Pueblo chico, infierno grande’

In this article, we present an aspect of our ethnographic investigation with HIV-positive Latin Americans living in Japan. In order to investigate the relationship between HIV/AIDS and community support among HIV carriers, we interviewed 20 male HIV-positive Latin Americans living in Japan. From April to September 2002 and in August 2003 and 2004, we conducted a set of six 60-minute interviews with 20, 28-37-year-old HIV-positive males. Three of them were illegal aliens and seven of them claimed to be homosexual. Participants were contacted through a hospital, a non-government organization (NGO), and by snowball sampling. The analysis of the interviews indicates that informants did not find any community support. Informants were fully aware that the psychological pressure from the community affected negatively their CD4-count and viral load. Our analysis suggests three main issues concerning the ways our informants relate to their community: non-attachment, invisibility and under-representation. Serostatus, social class, sexual preference, ethnicity and legal status were referred to as barriers to freely associating within the community

Reductions for monotone Boolean circuits

AbstractThe large class, say NLOG, of Boolean functions, including 0-1 Sort and 0-1 Merge, have an upper bound of O(nlogn) for their monotone circuit size, i.e., they have circuits with O(nlogn) AND/OR gates of fan-in two. Suppose that we can use, besides such normal AND/OR gates, any number of more powerful “F-gates” which realize a monotone Boolean function F with r(≥2) inputs and r′(≥1) outputs. Note that the cost of each AND/OR gate is one and we assume that the cost of each F-gate is r. Now we define: A Boolean function f in NLOG is said to be F-Easy if f can be constructed by a circuit with AND/OR/F gates whose total cost is o(nlogn). In this paper we show that 0-1 Merge is not F-Easy for an arbitrary monotone function F such that r′≤r/logr