ABSTRACT
The existing literature on the protection of the international environment does not sufficiently convey the characteristics of international agreements mentioned above. The traditional contributions on trans-national commons describe countries’ environmental interaction as a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma, where free-riding inevitably leads to the ‘tragedy of commons’ [for a discussion, see Ostrom (1990)]. In more recent works on the subject, the repetition of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, under appropriate assumptions, can enlarge the set of equilibrium outcomes, and characterize situations where all countries cooperate [for a discussion, see Maler (1989), Barrett (1992)]. Partial cooperation and the role of transfers, however, are not usually considered in either approach.
