A Herd Mentality in the Design of International Environmental Agreements?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When addressing an externality such as air pollution, regulators can control policy inputs (e.g., pollution taxes and technology standards) or outputs (e.g., emission caps). Economists are familiar with this debate, known broadly as “prices vs. quantities,” but analysts of international environmental agreements have rarely focused sustained attention to such questions. Using an inventory of all international air pollution agreements, we document the historical patterns in instrument choice. Those agreements that require little effort beyond the status quo are usually codified in terms of effort, but agreements that require substantial actions by the parties nearly always deploy a cap on emission quantities as the central regulatory instrument. We suggest that this concentration of experience with emission caps and paucity of serious efforts to coordinate policy inputs may explain why the architects of international environmental agreements appear to believe that emission caps work best. We illustrate what's at stake with the example of international efforts to control the emissions that cause global climate change. We also show that the conventional history of the agreement that is most symbolic of the superiority of emission caps—the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer—has wrongly overlooked a little-known provision that operates akin to a “price” instrument.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it