Externalities and compensation: Primeval games and solutions

The classical literature [Pigou, A.C., 1920. The Economics of Welfare. Macmillan, London; Coase, R.H., 1960. The problem of social cost. Journal of Law and Economics 3, 1-44; Arrow, K., 1970. The organization of economic activity: issues pertinent to the choice of market versus non-market allocation. In: Haveman, R.H., Margolis, J. (Eds.), Public Expenditures and Policy Analysis. Markham, Chicago, pp. 59-73] and the relatively recent studies [cf. Varian, H.R., 1994. A solution to the problem of externalities when agents are well-informed. American Economic Review 84, 1278-1293] associate the externality problem with efficiency. This paper focuses explicitly on the compensation problem in the context of externalities. To capture the features of inter-individual externalities, this paper constructs a new game-theoretic framework: primeval games. These games are used to design normative compensation rules for the underlying compensation problems: the marginalistic rule, the concession rule, and the primeval rule. Characterizations of the marginalistic rule and the concession rule are provided and specific properties of the primeval rule are studied.