Measles, a disease caused by the highly infectious Rubeola virus, is responsible for 10% of global mortality for children under 5 years old. Measles infection can be prevented by an easy to administer and cheap vaccine given to young children. Following a successful international campaign to...

Greenhouse gas abatement is a public good, so climate policy is a public-goods game and suffers from the free-rider incentives that make the outcome of such games notoriously uncooperative. Adopting an international agreement can change the nature of the game, reducing or exacerbating the...

I examine enforcement and capacity building in international cooperation. In a game-theoretic model, a wealthy donor gives foreign aid in exchange for policy implementation by a poor recipient. The recipient has limited capacity to comply with international agreements, so the donor is not sure...

This paper solves the global cap-and-trade game exactly as the public-goods game is normally solved and finds a problematic outcome. Abatement of greenhouse gas emissions is a global public good, and supplying a public good is a game with strong incentives to free ride. Adding a cap-and-trade...

Exactly why the nations of the world have had difficulty in reaching agreement on reducing greenhouse gases that cause climate change is something of a puzzle. Although the future generations that will suffer the greater costs from climate change will probably be wealthier, the non-trivial risks...

How can we explain an international agreement that fall outside of the win-set of one of the key players? This article surveys the US-EU Open Skies agreement signed in 2007 and asks why Europeans accepted the agreement after having rejected a comparable version three years earlier. Theoretical...

This report suggests and justifies a simple approach to arms competitions, wherein arms competitions are viewed as disaggregated competition between pairs of weapons systems for executing mutually incompatible policy goals. This approach is derived from a decision theoretic model of armament...

States have treaty-based and customary international law-based responsibilities to ensure that greenhouse gas emissions emanating from their territory do not cause transboundary harm. However, those international legal responsibilities conflict with the observed behavior of states, which...

Climate negotiations have largely failed, so a change of course is required. This requires that a sizable group of experts recommend a small, clear set of policy guideposts that lead to a more cooperative treaty. This papers proposes a set of three guideposts and derives them from an analysis of...

Approaching the complexities inherent in human behavior, and compounded by the increasingly multifaceted environment we live in, requires multiple angles of attack. Hence, combining theoretical investigations and applied techniques appears to be a promising approach to inform the scientific and...