Achieving efficiency for many global environmental problems requires voluntary cooperation among sovereign countries due to the public good nature of pollution abatement. The theory of international environmental agreements (IEAs) in economics seeks to understand how cooperation among countries...

Why cooperation occurs when noncooperation appears to be individually rational has been an issue in economics for at least a half century. In the 1960's and 1970's the context was cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game; in the 1980's concern shifted to voluntary provision of public goods; in...