Optimal R&D investment is defined by deep uncertainty that can only partially be addressed through historical data. Thus, expert judgments expressed as subjective probability distributions are seen as an alternative way of assessing the potential of new technologies. In this paper we propose a...

Composite indicators are becoming increasingly infuential tools of environmental assessment and advocacy. Nonetheless, their use is controversial as they often rely on ad-hoc and theoretically problematic assumptions regarding normalization, aggregation, and weighting. Nonparametric data...

Standard economic models of groundwater management impose restrictive assumptions regarding perfect transmissivity (i.e., the aquifer behaves as a bathtub), no external effects of groundwater stocks, observability of individual extraction rates, and/or homogenous agents. In this article, we...

Consider a collection of m indivisible objects to be allocated to n agents, where m ≥ n. Each agent falls in one of two distinct categories: either he (a) has a complete ordinal ranking over the set of individual objects, or (b) has a set of "plausible" benchmark von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM)...

The precautionary principle (PP) applied to environmental policy stipulates that, in the presence of physical uncertainty, society must take robust preventive action to guard against worst-case outcomes. It follows that the higher the degree of uncertainty, the more aggressive this preventive...

Many aspects of social welfare are intrinsically multidimensional. Composite indices at-tempting to reduce this complexity to a unique measure abound in many areas of economics and public policy. Comparisons based on such measures depend, sometimes critically, on how the different dimensions of...

In this paper we present and discuss the results of an expert elicitation survey on solar technologies. Sixteen leading European experts from the academic world, the private sector and international institutions took part in this expert elicitation survey on Photovoltaic (PV) and Concentrated...

In the absence of significant greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation, many analysts project that atmospheric concentrations of species identified for control in the Kyoto protocol could exceed 1000 ppm (carbon-dioxide-equivalent) by 2100 from the current levels of about 435 ppm. This could lead to...

In this paper we argue that when a subgroup of countries cooperate on emission reduction, the optimal response of non-signatory countries reflects the interaction between three potentially opposing factors, the incentive to free-ride on the benefits of cooperation, the incentive to expand the...

With a focus on establishing whether climate targets can be met under different personal transport scenarios we introduce a transport sector representing the use and profile of light domestic vehicles (LDVs) into the integrated assessment model WITCH. In doing so we develop long term projections...