Starting in 2005, the EU will implement a CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> emissions trading scheme. We show that the outspoken objectives of economic efficiency and free allocation of allowances are incompatible with harmonized allocation rules. The latter would be necessary to avoid unequal changes of the financial...</subscript>

We address the problem of preemptive land development to avoid future regulation. We demonstrate that differentiated treatment of landowners is generally essential to optimally deal with preemption. While differentiated policies improve welfare, they require the regulator to be informed about...

Learning-i.e. the acquisition of new information that leads to changes in our assessment of uncertainty-plays a prominent role in the international climate policy debate. For example, the view that we should postpone actions until we know more continues to be influential. The latest work on...

<Para ID="Par1">We investigate political economy determinants of energy tax differentiation across industries. Based on a theoretical common agency model, we show that differences in the ease of energy demand reductions across industries explain the pattern of tax differentiation: if the government is...</para>

We investigate how burden sharing rules impact the voluntary provision of a public good which generates heterogeneous benefits to agents. We compare different rule-based contribution schemes where agents can first suggest a minimum provision level of the public good, before the smallest common...

Transparency and accountability are often regarded as crucial for good governance and the efficient organization of public affairs. To systematically explore the impact of transparency and accountability on cooperation, we conduct a series of laboratory experiments on a variation of the public...

We study if and how social preferences extend to risky environments. We provide experimental evidence from different versions of dictator games with risky outcomes and establish that preferences that are exclusively based on ex post or on ex ante comparisons cannot generate the observed...

We report insights into the behavior of prisoners in dilemma situations that so famously carry their name. We compare female inmates and students in a simultaneous and a sequential Prisoner's Dilemma. In the simultaneous Prisoner's Dilemma, the cooperation rate among inmates exceeds the rate of...

In this study, we consider how gift-exchange and bonus systems function in a natural field setting by measuring the effort response of participants to non-monetary gifts over time. Our field experiment tests the difference in effort response to unconditional gifts delivered immediately, promised...