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1. Group Incentives for Environmental Protection and Natural Resource Management

   https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-resource-111920-020235  

   Segerson, Kathleen (October 2022, Annual Review of Resource Economics)

   Group incentives can and have been used to address a range of environmental and resource problems. These schemes base individual penalties and/or rewards on the performance of a group of individuals or firms who contribute to the environmental or resource problem. The economics literature on team incentives and public goods, as well as the literature specifically on environmental and natural resource management, provides insights into the design of group incentives. This article reviews the literature on group incentives in the context of environmental protection and natural resource policy. This literature suggests that group incentives can be effective and even efficient as environmental policy tools. However, the outcomes under group incentives will likely depend on a combination of the policy design and the nature of the internal group interactions. Within-group interactions are likely to be particularly important when policies involve thresholds so that coordination is needed to reach a cooperative equilibrium. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Resource Economics, Volume 14 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates. 

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2. A Gittins Policy for Optimizing Tail Latency

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3727109  

   Harlev, Amit; Yu, George; Scully, Ziv (May 2025, Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems)

   We consider the problem of scheduling to minimize asymptotic tail latency in an M/G/1 queue with unknown job sizes. When the job size distribution is heavy-tailed, numerous policies that do not require job size information (e.g. Processor Sharing, Least Attained Service) are known to be strongly tail optimal, meaning that their response time tail has the fastest possible asymptotic decay. In contrast, for light-tailed size distributions, only in the last few years have policies been developed that outperform simple First-Come First-Served (FCFS). The most recent of these is γ-Boost, which achieves strong tail optimality in the light-tailed setting. But thus far, all policies that outperform FCFS in the light-tailed setting, including γ-Boost, require known job sizes. In this paper, we design a new scheduling policy that achieves strong tail optimality in the light-tailed M/G/1 with unknown job sizes. Surprisingly, the optimal policy turns out to be a variant of the Gittins policy, but with a novel and unusual feature: it uses a negative discount rate. Our work also applies to systems with partial information about job sizes, covering γ-Boost as an extreme case when job sizes are in fact fully known. 

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3. Agricultural Trade and Environmental Sustainability

   https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-resource-101420-090453  

   Baylis, Kathy; Heckelei, Thomas; Hertel, Thomas W. (October 2021, Annual Review of Resource Economics)

   null (Ed.)

   Global agriculture consumes substantial resources and produces significant pollution. By shifting its production to new locations, and inducing changes in technology and input use, trade has a substantial impact on environmental sustainability of the world's food systems, but due to suboptimal environmental policy, the exact nature of these impacts is in dispute. We review the literature on agricultural trade and environmental sustainability, highlighting the different approaches taken in ecology versus economics. While useful in identifying environmental costs, much of the ecological literature does not compare these costs to a trade-free counterfactual and can therefore be misleading. Further, by moving production to places with more resources and increasing production efficiency, trade can reduce the environmental impact of food production. On the other hand, trade can also limit the effectiveness of domestic environmental policy because production can be shifted to countries with less stringent regulations. However, recently, consumers are leveraging trade policy to induce exporters to improve environmental sustainability. While such policies are gaining traction in wealthy countries, evidence suggests that such measures will not reach their potential without buy-in from decision makers in the countries where the environmental damages are occurring. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Resource Economics, Volume 13 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates. 

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4. Punctuated equilibrium or incrementalism in policymaking: What we can and cannot learn from the distribution of policy changes

   https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168019871399  

   Desmarais, Bruce_A (August 2019, Research & Politics)

   Theories in political science are most commonly tested through comparisons of means via difference tests or regression, but some theoretical frameworks offer implications regarding other distributional features. I consider the literature on models of policy change, and their implications for the thickness of the tails in the distribution of policy change. Change in public policy output is commonly characterized by periods of stasis that are punctuated by dramatic change—a heavy-tailed distribution of policy change. Heavy-tailed policy change is used to differentiate between the incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium models of policy change. The evidentiary value of heavy-tailed outputs rests on the assumption that changes in inputs are normally distributed. I show that, in order for conventional assumptions to imply normally distributed inputs, variance in the within-time distribution of inputs must be assumed to be constant over time. I present this result, and then present an empirical example of a possible aggregate policy input—a major public opinion survey item—that exhibits over-time variation in within-time variance. I conclude that the results I present should serve as motivation for those interested in testing the implications of punctuated equilibrium theory to adopt more flexible assumptions regarding, and endeavor to measure, policy inputs. 

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5. Estimation of the covariance structure of heavy-tailed distributions

   Minsker, Stanislav; Wei, Xiaohan (December 2017, NIPS)

   We propose and analyze a new estimator of the covariance matrix that admits strong theoretical guarantees under weak assumptions on the underlying distribution, such as existence of moments of only low order. While estimation of covariance matrices corresponding to sub-Gaussian distributions is well-understood, much less in known in the case of heavy-tailed data. As K. Balasubramanian and M. Yuan write, "data from real-world experiments oftentimes tend to be corrupted with outliers and/or exhibit heavy tails. In such cases, it is not clear that those covariance matrix estimators .. remain optimal" and "what are the other possible strategies to deal with heavy tailed distributions warrant further studies." We make a step towards answering this question and prove tight deviation inequalities for the proposed estimator that depend only on the parameters controlling the intrinsic dimension'' associated to the covariance matrix (as opposed to the dimension of the ambient space); in particular, our results are applicable in the case of high-dimensional observations. 

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