The existing international agreements on climate change are inadequate, according to Scott Barrett, and a new approach is needed.

We critically review the Kyoto Protocol and thirteen alternative policy architectures for addressing the threat of global climate change. We employ six criteria to evaluate the policy proposals: environmental outcome, dynamic efficiency, cost-effectiveness, equity, flexibility in the presence of...

Ever since the Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted in 1992, negotiation of emission limits has been intertwined with efforts to define a threshold for “dangerous” climate change. In this chapter, I explain the logic behind this framing of the collective action problem; show...

In some important multi-player situations, such as efforts to supply a global public good, players can choose the game they want to play. In this paper we conduct an experimental test of the decision to choose between a “tipping” game, in which every player wants to contribute to the public...

According to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, global collective action is needed to stabilize “greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous [our emphasis] anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” The Framework Convention thus...

This book honours Partha Dasgupta, and the field he helped establish; environment and development economics. It concerns the relationship between social systems (to include families, local communities, national economies, and the world as a whole) and natural systems (critical ecosystems,...

This paper develops a coherent theory of international cooperation relying on the twin assumptions of individual and collective rationality. Using a linear version of the N-player prisoner's dilemma game, I provide a formal proof of Olson's conjecture that only a `small' number of countries can...

If the threshold that triggers climate catastrophe is known with certainty, and the benefits of avoiding catastrophe are high relative to the costs, treaties can easily coordinate countries’ behavior so as to avoid the threshold. Where the net benefits of avoiding catastrophe are lower,...