Complex systems exposed to pollution may suddenly and permanently shift to a dangerous regime. This paper studies a dynamic game among countries that face the prospect of such a shift. Each country derives some flow utility from its own emissions, which are chosen unilaterally. But flow...

Climate change is one of the major global challenges. Mitigating its impact is however bedeviled byfree-rider problems and external effects. We thus study the problem of optimal carbon abatement in a dynamic non-cooperative game-theoretical setting involving multiple countries that are open...

The provision of global public goods, such as climate change mitigation and managing fisheries to avoid overharvesting, requires the coordination of national contributions. The contributions are managed by elected governments who, in turn, are subject to public pressure on the matter. In an...

The provision of global public goods, such as climate change mitigation and managing fisheries to avoid overharvesting, requires the coordination of national contributions. The contributions are managed by elected governments who, in turn, are subject to public pressure on the matter. In an...

For our experiment on corruption, we designed a coordination game to model the influence of risk attitudes, beliefs, and information on behavioral choices and determined the equilibria. We observed that the risk attitude of the participant failed to explain their choices between corrupt and...

A regulatory agency’s arsenal often contains multiple weapons. Occasionally, however, an agency has the power to completely obliterate its regulatory targets or to make major waves in society by using a “regulatory nuke.” A regulatory nuke is a tool with two primary characteristics. First,...

We introduce bureaucratic corruption in a simple way and examine its effect on government revenue when policies change. We show that a rise in the tax rate can lead to a fall in net revenue -- a Laffer curve result due to the proportion of auditors that are corrupt and enforcement costs. It may...

We develop a theory of policymaking between a principal, an agent, and an overseer. The agent increases the overall quality of policy outcomes through costly capacity investments. Oversight impacts agent investment incentives, but only if the policy bias of the agent does as well. The principal...

The paper analyzes how cooperation in a repeated social game may help to sustain cooperation in a "linked" repeated production game. We show that this may happen a) because of available "social capital," defined as the slack of punishment power present in the social repeated game; b) because,...