This study examines the performance of stable cooperative coalitions that form to provide a public good when coalition members have the opportunity to not comply with their commitments. A stable coalition is one in which no member wishes to leave and no non-member wishes to join. To counteract...

This paper uses laboratory experiments to investigate the performance of emission permit markets when compliance is imperfectly enforced. In particular we examine deviations in observed aggregate payoffs and expected penalties from those derived from a model of risk-neutral payoff-maximizing...

This paper presents the results from a series of framed field experiments conducted in fishing communities off the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The goal is to investigate the relative effectiveness of exogenous regulatory pressure and pro-social emotions in promoting cooperative behavior in a...

Two important design elements for emission trading programs are whether and to what extent firms are able to bank emissions permits, and how these programs are to be enforced. In this paper we present results from laboratory emissions markets designed to investigate enforcement and compliance...

Although the theoretical literature on the performance of voluntary approaches to environmental protection has progressed quite far in the last decade, no one has rigorously addressed the obvious point that even voluntary emissions control policies must be enforced. This paper examines the...

Theoretical analyses of international environmental agreements (IEAs) have typically employed the concept of self-enforcing agreements to predict the number of parties to such an agreement. The term self-enforcing, however, is a bit misleading. The concept refers to the stability of cooperative...

This paper examines the endogenous formation of coalitions that provide public goods in which players implement a minimum participation requirement before deciding whether to join. We demonstrate theoretically that payoff-maximizing players will vote to implement efficient participation...

With data from framed common pool resource experiments conducted with artisanal fishing communities in Colombia, we estimate a hierarchical linear model to investigate within-group and between-group variation in individual harvest strategies across several institutions. Our results suggest that...

This paper uses experimental data to test for a complementary relationship between formal regulations imposed on a community to conserve a local natural resource and nonbinding verbal agreements to do the same. Our experiments were conducted in the field in three regions of Colombia. Each group...

This paper uses laboratory experiments to test the theoretical observations that both the violations of competitive risk-neutral firms and the marginal effectiveness of increased enforcement across firms are independent of differences in their abatement costs and their initial allocations of...