The paper explores the implications of melioration learning—an empirically significant variant of reinforcement learning—for game theory. We show that in games with invariable pay-offs melioration learning converges to Nash equilibria in a way similar to the replicator dynamics. Since melioration learning is known to deviate from optimizing behavior when an action’s rewards decrease with increa...

We analyze how the threat of a potential future regime shift affects optimal management. We use a simple general growth model to analyze four cases that involve combinations of stock collapse versus changes in system dynamics, and exogenous versus endogenous probabilities of regime shift. Prior work has focused on stock collapse with endogenous probabilities and reaches ambiguous conclusions ab...

Using cross-country data from a sample of low, middle and high-income countries, the paper provides the first empirical test of the empirical relationships between national measures of social capital (civic and public), social divergence and social capacity upon various indicators of national environmental performance. The results indicate a possible link between public social capital (democrac...

This note offers a general proof of the converse of Hartwick’s rule, namely that — in an economy with stationary instantaneous preferences and a stationary technology — an efficient constant utility path is characterized by the value of net investments being zero at each point in time. In a one consumption economy with two stocks — a stock of a natural resource and a stock of man-made capital —...

This paper analyzes conservation and extinction of renewable resources when the production function is nonconcave and the return function depends on consumption and the resource stock. The paper focuses on the efficiency of global conservation, a safe standard of conservation, and extinction. Which outcome obtains depends on the marginal rate of substitution between investment and the stock in ...

Integrated assessment models of climate change typically analyze the case of a doubling of atmospheric CO2.over the pre-industrial concentration of about 270 ppm. This is a serious shortcoming since under a scenario in which all accessible fossil fuels are burned, atmospheric CO2 concentrations will more than quadruple. We introduce an analytical framework that endogenously accounts for potenti...

The spontaneous fission lifetimes have been studied microscopically by minimizing the collective action integral in a two-dimensional collective space of quadrupole moments (Q20, Q22) representing elongation and triaxiality. The microscopic collective potential and inertia tensor are obtained by solving the self-consistent HartreeFock-Bogoliubov (HFB) equations with the Skyrme energy density fu...

We discuss an analytically tractable discrete-time dynamic game in which a finite number of players extract a renewable resource. We characterize a symmetric Markov-perfect Nash equilibrium of this game and derive a necessary and sufficient condition under which the resource does not become extinct in equilibrium. This condition requires that the intrinsic growth rate of the resource exceeds a ...

We contribute to the understanding of marine reserves and the management of renewable resources with uncertainty. We show that the key benefit of reserves is that they increase resilience, or the speed it takes a population to return to a former state following a negative shock. Resilience can also increase resource rents even with optimal harvesting. We contradict the accepted wisdom that rese...

Huntington's disease (HD) is an autosomal-dominant neurodegenerative disorder caused by a polyglutamine expansion in the amino-terminal region of the huntingtin protein, which promotes progressive neuronal cell loss, neurological symptoms and death. In the present study, we show that blockade of mGluR5 with MTEP promotes increased locomotor activity in both control (Hdh(Q20/Q20)) and mutant HD ...