Land use is a key driver of the ongoing biodiversity crisis and therefore also a major opportunity for its mitigation. However, appropriately considering the diversity of land-use actors and activities in conservation assessments and planning is challenging. As a result, top-down conservation...

Commodity agriculture continues to spread into tropical dry forests globally, eroding their social-ecological integrity. Understanding where deforestation frontiers expand, and which impacts this process triggers, is thus important for sustainability planning. We reconstructed past land-system...

Higher crop diversity can enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services; however, it remains unclear to what extent and where crop diversity can be increased. We use spatially explicit multiscale optimization to determine potential and attainable crop diversity with field-level land use data for...

CONTEXT: Farm size is a key indicator associated with environmental, economic, and social contexts and outcomes of agriculture. Farm size data is typically obtained from agricultural censuses or household surveys, but both are usually only available in infrequent time intervals and at aggregate...

Confirmation bias, which refers to unintentional and unknowing selectivity in the use of evidence, belongs to the major problems faced by organizations. In this article, we discuss job rotation as a natural solution to this problem. In a nutshell, adopting job rotation provides an organization...

We analyze the infuence of the number of competitors, the costs of doping and the distribution of talents on the doping behavior. In an n-player strategic game modelled as an all-pay auction, the players have private information about their talent and the amount of doping. The main finding of...

A non-governmental organization (NGO) can make a non-contractible investment to provide a public good. Only ownership can be specified ex ante, so ex post efficiency requires reaching an agreement with the government. Besley and Ghatak (2001) argue that the party with the larger valuation should...

The standard property rights approach is focused on ex ante investment incentives, while there are no transaction costs that might restrain ex post negotiations. We explore the implications of such transaction costs. Prominent conclusions of the property rights theory may be overturned: A party...

When penalties for first-time offenders are restricted, it is typically optimal for the lawmaker to overdeter repeat offenders. First-time offenders are then deterred not only by the (restricted) fine for a first offense, but also by the prospect of a large fine for a subsequent offense. Now...

Socio-economic and institutional changes may accelerate land-use and land-cover change. Our goal was to explore the determinants of agricultural land abandonment within one agro-climatic and economic region of post-Soviet European Russia during the first decade of transition from a state-command...