World Scientific Publishing Company Economics, Game Theory And International Environmental Agreements: The Ca' Foscari Lectures (World Scientific Lecture Notes In Economics And Policy): 7

Review "The focus of the book is on the formal game theoretic analysis. It carefully motivates and discusses model assumptions. All results are formally developed and proven … An outstanding feature of the book is its careful reflection on solution concepts and their interpretation." --MathSciNet Product Description The science and management of environmental problems is a vast area, comprising both the natural and social sciences, and the multidisciplinary links often make these issues challenging to comprehend. Economics, Game Theory and International Environmental Agreements: The Ca' Foscari Lectures aims to introduce students to the multidimensional character of international environmental problems in general, and climate change in particular.Ecology, economics, game theory and diplomacy are called upon and brought together in the common framework of a basic mathematical model. Within that framework, and using tools from these four disciplines, the book develops a theory that aims to explain and promote cooperation in international environmental affairs.Other books on the topic tend to be research-oriented volumes of various papers. Instead, this is a book that offers a reasonably-sized synthesis of the multidimensional societal problems of transfrontier pollution, particularly of climate change. It uses mathematical modeling of economic and game theory concepts to examine these environmental issues and demonstrate many results in an accessible fashion. Readers interested in understanding the links between ecology and economics, as well as the connection between economics and institutional decision-making, will find in this text not only answers to many of their queries but also questions for further thinking. About the Author Henry Tulkens has been teaching Political Economy, Public Economics and Economic Dynamics at Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. His research is conducted at CORE (Center for Operations Research and Econometrics), an interdisciplinary research institution within the university. Professor Tulkens received his higher education successively at the universities of Leuven, where he studied law, and of Louvain, where he obtained the doctorate in economics and was appointed in 1968. He has held visiting positions at various universities, including Paris I, Princeton, Stanford, and was a consultant to the IMF, the EU and various governmental agencies. From 1997 to 2002, he was also Secretary of the European Economic Association.His research interests and publications bear mostly upon three themes: international aspects of environmental economics, as a field of application of game theory to public goods and externalities; fiscal competition and the foundations of federalism; and public enterprise economics.Several of his publications have been assembled in Public goods, environmental externalities and fiscal competition: 22 selected papers in public economics by Henry Tulkens, edited and introduced by Parkash Chander, Jacques Drèze, C Knox Lovell and Jack Mintz, Springer, Boston 2006 (588 pp). More recently, he edited with Roger Guesnerie The Design of Climate Policy, CESifo Seminar Series, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2009.