In addition to his role as a consumer pursuing his own interests, an individual may also regard himself as an ethical observer, judging matters from society's point of view. It is not clear which of these possibly conflicting roles respondents in contingent valuation studies take on. This leads...

Recently, it has been demonstrated that pre-existing distortionary taxes can substantially increase the costs of market-based instruments which do not raise revenue, such as non-auctioned emissions quotas. Revenue-raising market-based policy tools, such as carbon taxes, encounter other problems:...

Hirsch (1976) suggested that as consumption grows, an increasing proportion of the benefits people derive from consumption is due to a status effect. Status is a relative concept that cannot be increased on average; thus it may seem reasonable to expect that as consumption grows, the marginal...

I explore possible impacts of reciprocal preferences on participation in international environmental agreements. Reciprocal countries condition their willingness to abate on others' abatement. No participation is always stable. A full or majority coalition can be stable, provided that...

International climate negotiations have been troubled by mutual mistrust. At the same time, a hope seems to prevail that once enough countries moved forward, others would follow suit. If the abatement game faced by climate negotiators is a Prisoners' Dilemma, and countries are narrowly...

In social dilemmas, there is tension between cooperation that promotes the common good and the pursuit of individual interests. International climate change negotiations provide one example: although abatement costs are borne by individual countries, the benefits are shared globally. We study a...

It is often argued that projects involving public good changes should be chosen on the basis of monetary valuation and cost-benefit analysis (CBA). In democratic project selection processes, however,decision-makers cannot generally interpret CBA as measuring projects’ social welfare...

We report results from a dictator game experiment with nurse students and real estate broker students as dictators, and Amnesty International as the recipient. Although brokers contributed substantial amounts, nurses contributed significantly more, on average 76% of their endowment. In a second...

Survey and register data indicate that many employees prefer a socially responsible employer and will accept a lower wage to achieve this. Laboratory experiments support the hypothesis that socially responsible groups are more productive than others, partly because they attract cooperative...

Firms with a reputation as socially responsible may have an important cost advantage: If workers prefer their employer to be socially responsible, equilibrium wages may be lower in such firms. We explore this hypothesis, combining Norwegian register data with data on firm reputation collected by...