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...

How should a decision-maker allocate R&D funds when a group of experts provides divergent estimates on a technology's potential effectiveness? To address this question, we propose a simple decision-theoretic framework that takes into account ambiguity over the aggregation of expert opinion and a...

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...

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...

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...

Social well-being is intrinsically multidimensional. Welfare indices attempting to reduce this complexity to a unique measure abound in many areas of economics and public policy. Ranking alternatives based on such measures depends, sometimes critically, on how the different dimensions of welfare...

How can a decision-maker assess the potential of environmental policies when a group of experts provides divergent estimates on their effectiveness? To address this question, we propose and analyze a variant of the well-studied $\alpha$-maxmin model in decision theory. In our framework, and...

I study a class of differential games of pollution control with profit functions that are polynomial in the global pollution stock. Given an emissions path satisfying mild regularity conditions, a simple polynomial ambient transfer scheme is exhibited that induces it in Markov-perfect...

We study the problem of dissolving an equal-entitlement partnership when the objective is to minimize maximum regret. We initially focus on the family of linear-pricing mechanisms and derive regret-optimizing strategies. We also demonstrate that there exist linear-pricing mechanisms satisfying...