In a river claims problem, agents are ordered linearly, and they have both an initial water endowment as well as a claim to the total water resource. We provide characterizations of two solutions to this problem, using Composition properties which have particularly relevant interpretations for...

We study label framing effects in linear public goods games. By accounting for heterogeneous frame connotation, we can identify individual framing effects. We test for such effects in a field experiment on irrigation management in India. Using membership of the water users association as a proxy...

Decentralization of irrigation management to local communities is often claimed to improve performance. The argument is that decentralization enhances the perceived legitimacy of irrigation management, which in turn increases the willingness of water users to cooperate and contribute to...

Violence and coercion are key to understanding economic and social interactions in any society. This premise was used by North et al. (2009) to distinguish three `patterns of social organization' that societies have used to solve the problem of violence. We model one of these, the `limited...

Violence is key to understanding human interaction and societal development. The natural state of societal organization is that a subset of the population, capable of mustering organized large-scale violence, forms an elite coalition that restrains both violence and coercive appropriation. We...

This paper opens a series of discussion papers which report about the findings of a research project within the Phare-ACE Programme of the European Union. We, a group of Bulgarian, German, Greek, Polish and Scottish economists and agricultural economists, undertake this research to provide An...

In socialist economies firms have provided various social benefits, like child care, health care, food subsidies, housing etc. Using panel data from Bulgarian and Polish firms, this paper attempts to explain firm-specific provision of social benefits in the process of transition. We investigate...

The value concept of traditional resource economics is welfare. Therefore,sustainability of welfare is often taken to characterise our obligations to future generations. This paper argues that this view is inappropriate because it leaves no room for futuregenerations autonomy. Future generations...

In modern political philosophy social contract theory is the most prominentapproach to individual rights and fair institutions. According to social contract theory thesystem of rights in a society ought to be justified by reconstructing its basic features as acontract between the mutually...

The paper is an enquiry into dynamic social contract theory. The social contractdefines the rules of resource use. An intergenerational social contract in an economy with asingle exhaustible resource is examined within a framework of an overlapping generationsmodel. It is assumed that new...