Farmers are well known to be risk-averse. Although a considerable literature has focused on the role water markets play to allocate water more efficiently, none has explicitly studied the risk management role water markets play in irrigators’ decision making. We used a two-step empirical...

This chapter will discuss what economics can tell us about New Media. More interestingly, perhaps, at least to those concerned with the long-term impact of New Media, it will examine the implications of New Media for economics and economic organization, and offer some policy recommendations.

We develop a model of games with awareness that allows for differential levels of awareness. We show that, for the standard modal logical interpretations of belief and awareness, a player cannot believe there exist propositions of which he is unaware. Nevertheless, we argue that a boundedly...

We focus on syntactic aspects of differential awareness that give rise to contractual disputes. Boundedly rational parties use a common language, but do not share a common understanding of the world, leading to ambiguity in both syntactic and semantic forms. In contractual relationships,...

We analyse access price setting to a bottleneck facility where the fa- cility owner also competes in the deregulated downstream market. We consider a continuum of market structures from Cournot to Bertrand. These market structures are fully characterised by a single parame- ter representing the...

We focus on aspects of differential awareness that give rise to contractual disputes. Parties to a contract are boundedly rational as the state space available to them is coarser than the complete state space. Hence, they may disagree as to which state of the world has occurred, and therefore as...

Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) are the most widely-used measure of health in cost– effectiveness analysis and cost–benefit analysis. Within a welfarist framework QALYs are consistent with people’s preferences under stringent assumptions. Several authors have argued that QALYs are a...

We provide a very different way to think about how consensus may arise. We deliberately skimp on the micro-processes of persuasion usually emphasized in constructivist accounts, instead highlighting the structural aspects of the cross-national networks through which experts communicate with each...

Economic policy debate in Australia is dominated by the belief that the nation’s economy experienced a surge in productivity in the mid-1990s. The surge is attributed to programs of microeconomic reform that began in earnest with the floating of the dollar in 1983. It was particularly welcomed...

Most models of optimal climate change policy are complex and opaque. In this paper, it is argued that the convexity of climate damage and mitigation cost function provides a basis for the derivation of simple and robust estimates of optimal stabilization targets and carbon prices. For all but a...