Carbon is Forever: A Climate Change Experiment on Cooperation

Abstract

Greenhouse gases generate impacts that can last longer than human civilization itself.Such persistence may affect the behavioral ability to cooperate. Here we study mitigation efforts within a framework that reflects key features of climate change and then contrasts a dynamic versus a static setting. In a treatment with persistence, the pollution cumulates and generates damages over time while in another treatment it has only immediate effects and then disappears. We find that cooperation is not hampered, on average, by pollution persistence. Mitigation efforts, though, should not be delayed, because cooperation levels appear to deteriorate for high stocks of pollution.

Climate Change: Behavioral Responses from Extreme Events and Delayed Damages

“…Sherstyuk et al (2016) compares overlapping generations versus long-lived agents and reports that cooperation is harder to sustain for overlapping generations; Pevnitskaya and Ryvkin (2013) contrasts finite and indefinite horizons and find that participants learn to cooperate faster in the former setting, although they experience a last round drop; finally, Calzolari et al (2016) study pollution persistence in a dynamic setting and show that it does not hamper cooperation per se but report a declining trend of cooperation for higher stocks of pollution. The novelty in our experimental design is to decouple actions and their consequences on damages, which in most studies are instead associated and indistinguishable.…”

“…More precisely, we design a climate change game as a N -person voluntary public bad game where decision-makers repeatedly interact under a long-run horizon (Dutta and Radner, 2004;Calzolari et al, 2016). Each decision-maker decides on a level of emissions, which brings individual benefits from production and consumption but generates a negative externality to everyone in terms of climate damages.…”

“…First, we model climate damages as a flow externality that linearly increases in emissions, although a more accurate function would be a stock externality with possible non-linearities between emissions and damages (Burke et al, 2015;Dannenberg et al, 2015). A previous experiment showed a negative empirical effect of pollution persistence on the empirical levels of aggregate cooperation (Calzolari et al, 2016).…”

Climate Change: Behavioral Responses from Extreme Events and Delayed Damages

“…More precisely, we design a climate change game as a N-person voluntary public bad game where decisionmakers repeatedly interact under a long-run horizon (Dutta and Radner, 2004;Calzolari et al, 2016). Each decision-maker decides on a level of emissions, which brings individual benefits from production and consumption but generates a negative externality to everyone in terms of climate damages.…”

“…First, we model climate damages as a flow externality that linearly increases in emissions, although a more accurate function would be a stock externality with possible non-linearities between emissions and damages (Burke et al, 2015;Dannenberg et al, 2015). A previous experiment showed a negative effect of pollution persistence on the empirical levels of cooperation in the long-run (Calzolari et al, 2016).…”