This workshop on natural resource and environmental economics will host Éric Bahel, professor in the Department of Economics at Virginia Tech, who will present “Anonymous and Strategy-Proof Voting According to Subjective Expected Utility Preferences.” The second speaker will be Dana Ghandour, a doctoral student at Concordia University, who will present “Environmental Cooperation and Trade – The Impact of Heterogeneity in Environmental Damage: An Endogenous Solution.”

• Éric Bahel (Viginia Tech)
  « Anonymous and Strategy-Proof Voting under Subjective Expected Utility Preferences »
  We study three axioms in the model of constrained social choice under
  uncertainty where (i) agents have subjective expected utility preferences over
  acts and (ii) different states of nature have (possibly) different sets of available
  outcomes. Anonymity says that agents’ names or labels should never
  play a role in the mechanism used to select the social act. Strategy-proofness
  requires that reporting one’s true preferences be a (weakly) dominant strategy
  for each agent in the associated direct revelation game. Range unanimity
  essentially says that a feasible act must be selected by society whenever it
  is reported as every voter’s favorite act within the range of the mechanism.
  We first show that every social choice function satisfying these three axioms
  can be factored as a product of voting rules that are either constant
  or binary (always yielding one of two pre-specified outcomes in each state).
  We describe four basic types of binary factors: three of these types are
  novel to this literature and exploit the voters’ subjective beliefs. Our characterization
  result then states that a social choice function is anonymous,
  strategy-proof and range-unanimous if and only if every binary factor (in its
  canonical factorization) is of one of these four basic types.

• Dana Ghandour (Concordia University)
  « Environmental Cooperation and Trade – The Impact of Heterogeneity in Environmental Damages: An Endogenous Solution »
  This paper utilizes a three-country static model of environmental cooperation with trade to analyze
  the stability of partial and global International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) among
  environmentally heterogeneous countries. Strong incentives to free ride and challenges in
  enforcing international environmental agreements make international cooperation a difficult task.
  In the context of international trade, governments face a tradeoff between enforcing higher taxes
  to cooperatively reduce emissions and paying higher tariffs on exports when acting
  noncooperatively. Diamantoudi et al. (2018a) demonstrated that stable coalitions among
  homogeneous countries are larger and provide significant welfare gains compared to the basic
  model without trade.
  The paper’s objectives, therefore, are: (i) To determine whether environmental cooperation among
  heterogeneous countries provides environmental gains, overall welfare gains, or both, (ii) To
  identify which cooperative scenarios will emerge in a stable environmental coalition to exploit
  these gains, and (iii) To capture the effect of heterogeneity in environmental damages on the
  stability of these environmental coalitions. Cooperation entails that countries belonging to the
  same coalition choose the same emissions tax rate and common import tariffs .
  In the proposed model, each country has a single firm producing an emission-intensive
  homogeneous good, which results in an equal number of transboundary emissions such as carbon
  dioxide. The game is a three-stage static coalition formation game solved by backward induction.
  In stage one, each country chooses its coalition membership. A coalition is deemed stable if no
  firm has an incentive to either enter or exit the coalition (D’Aspremont et al., 1983). In stage two,
  each country determines the optimal emissions tax and import tariff rates that maximize the
  coalition’s welfare. In stage three, each firm chooses non-cooperatively its profit-maximizing
  production level. Firms compete à la Cournot in a segmented market with positive endogenous
  import tariffs rather than in a free trade setting.
  The main findings demonstrate that the grand coalition is stable at varying levels of environmental
  damage heterogeneity. When market sizes are sufficiently small, the grand coalition leads to both
  environmental and overall welfare gains. However, as market sizes grow sufficiently larger, the
  grand coalition only yields overall welfare gains.

This event will be held in English.