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We investigate how moral considerations, background conditions and risk can trigger resistance to implement trading institutions. We provide survey results on moral opposition to trade on several goods and services like body organs, sex services, surrogate mothers, trade with developing nations, and trade with carbon emissions. Complementary experimental evidence allows identifying reasons for opposing trade going beyond pure moral considerations. We relate the opposition to trade in experimental and field contexts to an aversion to imposing risks on others. We then vary both background conditions and the riskiness from engaging in actual trade in the experiment. We show that distributional concerns primarily drive opposition to trade. Providing less information about individual background conditions and distributing gains from trade more equally alleviates opposition to trade.

We study if and how social preferences extend to risky environments. By providing experimental evidence on different versions of dictator games with risky outcomes, we establish that social preferences of players who give in standard dictator games are best described by concerns for the distribution of ex ante chances to win rather than considerations of ex post payoff distributions. We find that the propensity to give in a standard dictator-game serves as a good predictor for behavior in risky situations: those who transfer more money in the dictator game are more likely to equalize the ex ante situation, i.e. payoff chances in other games. We further find that decision-makers give up less income than in the standard dictator game when giving increases only the chances of the recipient to gain income rather than increasing the recipient's income for sure. Our results thereby shed important light on how existing theories of social preferences can extend to a risky environment.

This paper puts forward equity as an important structural element to understanding negotiation outcomes. We first advance bargaining theory to incorporate the self-serving use of equity. Agents are predicted to push equity principles which benefit them more than other parties, in particular those which are disadvantageous to parties with large bargaining power. Based on unique data from a world-wide survey of agents involved in international climate policy, we then study how participants assess the support of the equity criteria by major parties in the climate negotiations. Comparing these results with cost estimates from a POLES model, we find that the perceived equity preferences of the respective countries or groups of countries are in general consistent with our hypothesis of a self-serving use of equity criteria and thereby lend support for our theoretical model. While this self-interest is recognized by the participants of our survey for the positions of the USA and the G77/China as well as Russia, the EU manages to be seen as choosing (self-serving) equity arguments out of fairness concerns and in order to facilitate the negotiations.

Based on unique data from a world-wide survey of agents involved in international climate policy, this paper empirically analyzes the importance of equity in this field. We find that equity issues are considered highly important in international climate negotiations and that the polluter-pays rule and the accompanying poor losers rule are the most widely accepted equity principles. Our econometric analysis shows a strong influence of the economic or emission performance of the agents? country on the importance of equity issues and principles: (i) Equity issues are seen as more important by individuals from G77/China countries or from countries with less current per capita GDP and less future per capita CO2 emissions. (ii) Agents from richer countries are less in favor of incorporating the polluter-pays and the ability-to-pay principle in future international climate agreements. (iii) The poor losers rule is more strongly supported by individuals from G77/China countries or by individuals from countries with less current per capita GDP. While these results are consistent with pure economic self-interest, the support for the egalitarian principle runs contrary to economic intuition: In the long-run, agents from richer countries are more in favor of incorporating the egalitarian principle. Furthermore, the effect of the economic performance variables on the desired degree of incorporating the polluter-pays principle interestingly becomes less significant in the long-run. This indicates that future international climate agreements could possibly be based on a combination of the polluter-pays, the egalitarian, and the poor losers rule.

This paper studies the impact of equity considerations on the stability of international agreements between heterogeneous countries. We show that allowing countries to finance abatement projects in developing countries which, due to equity-reasons, have no binding emission targets can reduce the number of cooperating countries and thereby be welfare-decreasing. Equity-concerns in industrialized countries regarding the gap between per-capita emission levels of industrialized and developing countries lead to an increased reduction in industrialized countries but do not qualitatively change the incentives to cooperate. Only if countries are inequality-averse with respect to potential differences between their abatement targets and those of other industrialized countries is the inclusion of developing countries generally profitable both in terms of participation rates and of emission reduction.

This paper studies the incentives for international cooperation if (some) countries prefer a more equitable distribution of per capita emission levels. The impact of such an equity preference is analyzed first for a bilateral, and then for a multilateral environmental problem. We show that - contrary to the two-country-case - for the latter there is no uniform percentage reduction of emissions that makes all countries better off. Rather, equity oriented countries (for example developing countries) enter a coalition only if they do not have to reduce as much. While equity preferences improve upon the prospects of cooperation if countries are not too different with respect to their per capita levels, if countries differ largely in population size and per capita emissions, generally no coalition will be stable without restrictions on entry into or exit out of a coalition. In such a situation, equity-orientation does not improve upon the prospects for cooperation.

This paper demonstrates that cooperation in international environmental negotiations can be explained by preferences for equity. Within a N-country prisoner?s dilemma in which agents can either cooperate or defect, in addition to the standard non-cooperative equilibrium, cooperation of a large fraction or even of all countries can establish a Nash equilibrium. In an emission game, however, where countries can choose their abatement level continuously, equity preferences cannot improve upon the standard inefficient Nash-equilibrium. Finally, in a two stage game on coalition formation, the presence of equity-interested countries increases the coalition size and leads to efficiency gains. Here, even a stable agreement with full cooperation can be reached.