Search results

How should tort law deal with agents that employ novel and imperfectly understood technologies that later turn out to involve harm? There is no agreement among different legal systems whether strict liability or negligence rules should govern these so-called 'development risks'. The law-and- economics literature, however, has predominantly favored strict liability. The present paper shows that the choice depends on the characterization of how society learns about technology risks. When experiential public data is an irreducible input into learning, theory justifies the use of specific negligence rules in order to govern development risks. We reconcile the existence of the negligence doctrine for development risks with the theoretical literature using a simple two-period unilateral care model. There, an optimally designed negligence rule can provide a better balancing of benefits, harm to third parties, costs of care effort, and the value of information from learning than strict liability. If feasible, the optimal negligence rule partitions the population of potential users into two groups. Only the high benefit group engages in the risky activity, subject to due care levels designed to deter the low benefit group.

The success of global climate policies over the coming decades depends on the diffusion of 'green' technologies. This requires that international environmental agreements (IEAs) and trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs) interact productively.Using a simple and tractable model, we highlight the strategic reduction in abatement commitments on account of a hold-up effect. In anticipation of rent extraction by the innovator signatories might abate less than non-signatories turning the IEA 'brown'. Self-enforcing IEAs have fewer signatories and diffusion can reduce global abatement under TRIPs. Countries hosting patent holders extract rents from TRIPs, but may be better off without them.

Disentangling the motivational drivers of individuals is frequently regarded a key step in reconciling theory and empirical evidence on the voluntary provision of public goods. We present results of a large online field experiments with 12,624 contribution choices by members of the Internet-using German population. Subjects are assigned to six treatments targeted at motivations such as altruism, "warm glow", image motivation, or equity concerns. While evidence on treatment effects is mixed, the data point to signicant effects of framing and the sequence of presenting options. Exploiting variations within the highly heterogeneous sample, the results confirm previous results from a subset of the data on sociodemographics and exogenous environmental conditions as determinants of subjects' choices and add additional evidence that females and older subjects are more inclined to give to the public good.

In the climate policy debate, a rhetoric has evolved that attributes a high potential to "voluntary climate action". We turn to the population of Germany, the fourth largest cumulative GHG emitter, to obtain an Internet-)representative estimate of the individual willingness to abate one ton of CO2, the equivalent of 10 percent of annual per-capita CO2 emissions. The estimate derives from a large-scale (n=2,440) framed field experiment in which subjects choose between a guaranteed reduction of one ton of EU CO2 emissions and a randomly drawn cash award between €2 and €100. At €6.30, estimated mean WTP is considerably lower than prior hypothetical or non-representative estimates. Median WTP is non-positive. The almost bimodal nature of WTP in the population has important policy implications.

We conduct a large-scale field experiment with 2,440 subjects in which we exogenously vary the price of contributing to the closest empirical counterpart of an infinitely large public good, climate change mitigation. We find that the price effect is robust and negative, but quantitatively weak, with a price elasticity of -0.25. Socioeconomic variables such as education, situational variables such as meteorological conditions around the time of the experiment, and attitudinal variables that can be linked to guilt and moral responsibility dominate the price effect. The latter also explain better than price arbitrage the decision of subjects to declare to be field price censored. The results provide an experimental window on the absolute and relative role of price effects on public goods contributions in a large economy and inform current attempts to build a coherent theory of charitable giving.

In the wake of several high-profile natural disasters, crowding effects between public relief and private investments in disaster preparedness have recently attracted renewed attention. We examine how non-hypothetical self-insurance behavior by households responds to variations in public investments in relief capabilities based on a large disaster preparedness survey (n = 19,071) conducted in Japan in 2012. The preparedness measure used is emergency drinking water storage, defining a setting in which (i) government provides in-kind, rather than cash, relief and (ii) the crowding effect observed is more apt to be total, rather than partial. In contrast to much of the literature studying crowding effects of cash relief, there is little evidence for crowding out in emergency drinking water, with an upper bound of 2 percent at the intensive margin.

In a climate system that is indifferent about where mitigation is carried out, the logic of comparative advantages favors abatement locations in developing and rapidly industrializing countries. There is evidence, however, that citizens of industrialized countries who voluntarily fund climate mitigation activities are not indifferent about the mitigation location. In our artifactual online experiment, subjects located in a European Union member state took a dichotomous choice between a cash prize and the verified mitigation of one metric ton of CO2. The treatment condition varied the location of the mitigation activity between the European Union and developing countries. We test whether the location impacts on the probability that the mitigation activity is chosen, harnessing between- and within-subject Variation in our panel data. Our evidence shows that subjects responded to the location being made salient, but, contrary to previous concerns, were indifferent between mitigation sites in the EU or developing countries.

In the wake of several high-profile natural disasters, crowding effects between public relief and private investments in disaster preparedness have recently attracted renewed attention. We examine how non-hypothetical self-insurance behavior by households responds to variations in public investments in relief capabilities based on a large disaster preparedness survey (n = 19,071) conducted in Japan in 2012. The preparedness measure used is emergency drinking water storage, defining a setting in which (i) government provides in-kind, rather than cash, relief and (ii) the crowding effect observed is more apt to be total, rather than partial. In contrast to much of the literature studying crowding effects of cash relief, there is little evidence for crowding out in emergency drinking water, with an upper bound of 2 percent at the intensive margin.

In a climate system that is indifferent about where mitigation is carried out, the logic of comparative advantages favors abatement locations in developing and rapidly industrializing countries. There is evidence, however, that citizens of industrialized countries who voluntarily fund climate mitigation activities are not indifferent about the mitigation location. In our artifactual online experiment, subjects located in a European Union member state took a dichotomous choice between a cash prize and the verified mitigation of one metric ton of CO2. The treatment condition varied the location of the mitigation activity between the European Union and developing countries. We test whether the location impacts on the probability that the mitigation activity is chosen, harnessing between- and within-subject Variation in our panel data. Our evidence shows that subjects responded to the location being made salient, but, contrary to previous concerns, were indifferent between mitigation sites in the EU or developing countries.