Countries often have private information about their willingness to pay for protecting the climate system and their cost of emission reductions. We use a principal-agent model to re-examine the economic case for unilateral action by individual countries, in our case of the principal. We find...

The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement fall short of the abatement needed to reach the 2°C target. Emissions trading could be a "costless" means to reduce the ambition gap if countries used their gains from trade for additional abatement. However, this requires...

We consider the cost of providing incentives using tournaments when workers are inequity averse and performance evaluation is costly. The principal never benefits from empathy to align incentives in a moral hazard framework between the workers, but he may benefit from their propensity for envy...