‘Risk’ has become a central theme in 21st-century policy thinking. In particular, there has been considerable discussion of the ‘Great Risk Shift’, that is, the process by which the burden of risk has been shifted away from governments and employers and on to workers and households. The...

The idea that preferences may be state-dependent fits naturally with an analysis of uncertainty based on explicit representation of random variables as state-contingent consumption or production bundles. In this paper we show how these concepts of risk-aversion may be extended to the case of...

The supply of water for irrigation is subject to climatic and policy uncertainty. The object of the present paper is to show how the linear and non-linear programming models commonly used in modelling problems such as those arising in the Murray–Darling Basin may be adapted to incorporate a...

We develop a model of games with awareness that allows for differential levels of awareness. We show that, for the standard modal logical interpretations of belief and awareness, a player cannot believe there exist propositions of which he is unaware. Nevertheless, we argue that a boundedly...

Insurance contracts are frequently modelled as principal--agent relationships. Although it is commonly assumed that the principal, in this case the insurer, has complete freedom to design the contract, the problem formulation in much of the principal--agent literature presumes that the contract...

The Murray-Darling Basin faces increasing pressure on water quantity and quality. In 2006-07, salt interception schemes implemented as part of the Murray-Darling Basin Salinity Management strategy removed over 470,000 tonnes of salt from the water supply, reducing the salinity of water flowing...

The central claim of this paper is that the state-contingent approach provides the best way to think about all problems in the economics of uncertainty, including problems of consumer choice, the theory of the firm, and principal–agent relationships. This claim is illustrated by recent...

The terms "grandfather clause" and "grandfathering" describe elements of a policy programme in which existing participants in an activity are protected from the impact of regulations, restrictions or charges applied to new entrants. In this paper, the role of grandfathering in the design of a...

Most urban areas in Australia are facing the prospect of increasing scarcity of water. Further pressure arises from evidence that existing levels of water use in many catchments are environmentally unsustainable. One option, feasible for some but not all Australian cities is the diversion to...

This paper describes experiences in the development and testing of three distinct financial models to support farm forestry decisions involving non-traditional tree species in northern Australia and in the Philippines. A variety of options were examined with respect to model design, yield...