Selected publications

• Solving Nash equilibria in nonlinear differential games for common-pool resources

  Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · 2026-03-25

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Interactions and tradeoffs for sustainability, equity, and resilience in wasted food models

  Environmental Research Communications · 2025-04-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Reducing wasted food has been identified as a key strategy to meet food security goals and attain human nutritional needs and food preferences in an equitable, sustainable, and resilient manner. Yet, mathematically modeling how reducing wasted food contributes to sustainability, equity, and resilience objectives, and the possible interactions and tradeoffs among these metrics, is limited by challenges to quantifying these characteristics. Using the process of convergent science, we develop a prototype wasted food model to evaluate how a set of common equity, sustainability, and resilience measures interact. We consider prevention (consumer education) and treatment (anaerobic digestion and composting) options for wasted food diversion from landfills. The model applies a convex nonlinear optimization to determine the allocation of wasted food to different management alternatives, optimizing for economic (net cost), sustainability (emissions reductions or energy savings), or equity (distribution of per-capita cost or emissions reduction impacts). The model developed in this research is available online as open-source code for others to replicate and build upon for future studies and analysis. Our findings illustrate that optimal wasted food management alternatives may vary when targeting different metrics and that strategies promoting cost-effectiveness may be in tension with sustainability or equity goals and vice versa. The implications of this study could be used by policy makers to evaluate how wasted food reduction measures will impact sustainability, equity, and resilience goals.

  PublisherDOI

• Solving Nash Equilibria in Nonlinear Differential Games for Common-Pool Resources

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Modeling Uncertainty in Integrated Assessment Models

  ArXiv.org · 2025-11-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are pivotal tools that synthesize knowledge from climate science, economics, and policy to evaluate the interactions between human activities and the climate system. They serve as essential instruments for policymakers, providing insights into the potential outcomes of various climate policies and strategies. Given the complexity and inherent uncertainties in both the climate system and socio-economic processes, understanding and effectively managing uncertainty within IAMs is crucial for robust climate policy development. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of how IAMs handle uncertainty, highlighting recent methodological advancements and their implications for climate policy. I examine the types of uncertainties present in IAMs, discuss various modeling approaches to address these uncertainties, and explore recent developments in the field, including the incorporation of advanced computational methods.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Solving Nash Equilibria in Nonlinear Differential Games for Common-Pool Resources

  ArXiv.org · 2025-06-07

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Many resources are provided by an ecological system that is vulnerable to tipping when exceeding a certain level of pollution, with a sudden big loss of ecosystem services. An ecological system is usually also a common-pool resource and therefore vulnerable to suboptimal use resulting from non-cooperative behavior. An analysis requires methods to derive cooperative and non-cooperative solutions for managing a dynamical system with tipping points. Such a game is a differential game which has two well-defined non-cooperative solutions, the open-loop and feedback Nash equilibria. This paper provides new numerical methods for deriving open-loop and feedback Nash equilibria, for one-dimensional and two-dimensional dynamical systems. The methods are applied to the lake game, which is the classical example for these types of problems. Especially, two-dimensional feedback Nash equilibria are a novelty of this paper. This Nash equilibrium is close to the cooperative solution which has important policy implications.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dynamics of Global Emission Permit Prices and Regional Social Cost of Carbon Under Noncooperation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• DRMAT: A multivariate algorithm for detecting breakpoints in multispectral time series

  Remote Sensing of Environment · 2024-09-11 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Assessing effects of climate and technology uncertainties in large natural resource allocation problems

  Geoscientific model development · 2024-06-19

  articleOpen access

  Abstract. The productivity of the world's natural resources is critically dependent on a variety of highly uncertain factors, which obscure individual investors and governments that seek to make long-term, sometimes irreversible, investments in their exploration and utilization. These dynamic considerations are poorly represented in disaggregated resource models, as incorporating uncertainty into large-dimensional problems presents a challenging computational task. In this paper, we apply the SCEQ algorithm (Cai and Judd, 2023) to solve a large-scale dynamic stochastic global land resource use problem with stochastic crop yields due to adverse climate impacts and limits on further technological progress. For the same model parameters and bounded shocks, the range of land conversion is considerably smaller for the dynamic stochastic model than for deterministic scenario analysis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dynamics of Global Emission Permit Prices and Regional Social Cost of Carbon under Noncooperation

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023-12-24

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We develop a dynamic multi-region climate-economy model with emissions trading and solve for the dynamic Nash equilibrium under noncooperation, where each region follows Paris Agreement-based emissions caps. The permit price reaches $923 per ton of carbon by 2050, and global temperature rises to 1.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100. The regional social cost of carbon equals the difference between regional marginal abatement cost and the permit price, highlighting complementarity between carbon taxes and trading. We find substantial heterogeneity in regional social costs of carbon, show that lax caps can raise emissions, and demonstrate strong free-rider incentives under partial participation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A simple but powerful simulated certainty equivalent approximation method for dynamic stochastic problems

  Quantitative Economics · 2023-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  We introduce a novel simulated certainty equivalent approximation (SCEQ) method for solving dynamic stochastic problems. Our examples show that SCEQ can quickly solve high‐dimensional finite‐ or infinite‐horizon, stationary or nonstationary dynamic stochastic problems with hundreds of state variables, a wide state space, and occasionally binding constraints. With the SCEQ method, a desktop computer will suffice for large problems, but it can also use parallel tools efficiently. The SCEQ method is simple, stable, and can utilize any solver, making it suitable for solving complex economic problems that cannot be solved by other algorithms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI