Subset Of Players Research Articles

International Institutions and Environmental Policy: International environmental agreements: Incentives and political economy

International environmental agreements are increasingly important in a globalised economy. Beyond their specific interest, these agreements are also important in the context of coalition formation theory. Given the incentives to free ride, associated to the environment as a public good and to the presence of spillovers, the profitability and the optimality of environmental agreements are separated from their stability (i.e. self-enforcement): hence, a whole set of political economy issues. This paper reviews the recent advances in this area. In particular, it discusses mechanisms and strategies aimed at offsetting the incentives to free ride and increasing welfare, such as transfers, issue linkages, threats and multiple agreements. The main results show that partial coalitions and multiple agreements tend to prevail among subsets of players, and that agreements among all players are most unlikely to exist. The design of the agreements, moreover, can be crucial in determining the number of signatory countries.

The assignment game I: The core

The assignment game is a model for a two-sided market in which a product that comes in large, indivisible units (e.g., houses, cars, etc.) is exchanged for money, and in which each participant either supplies or demands exactly one unit. The units need not be alike, and the same unit may have different values to different participants. It is shown here that the outcomes in thecore of such a game — i.e., those that cannot be improved upon by any subset of players — are the solutions of a certain linear programming problem dual to the optimal assignment problem, and that these outcomes correspond exactly to the price-lists that competitively balance supply and demand. The geometric structure of the core is then described and interpreted in economic terms, with explicit attention given to the special case (familiar in the classic literature) in which there is no product differentiation — i.e., in which the units are interchangeable. Finally, a critique of the core solution reveals an insensitivity to some of the bargaining possibilities inherent in the situation, and indicates that further analysis would be desirable using other game-theoretic solution concepts.