Alessandro Tavoni | Università di Bologna (original) (raw)
Papers by Alessandro Tavoni
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2024
Solar geoengineering denotes a set of technologies that would enable a fast and relatively cheap ... more Solar geoengineering denotes a set of technologies that would enable a fast and relatively cheap global temperature reduction. Besides potential physical side-effects, a major concern is the strategic dimension: Who is going to use solar geoengineering and how would it affect others? How does the presence of solar geoengineering change the strategic incentives surrounding other climate policy instruments such as mitigation? We review the existing theoretical and experimental contributions to those questions and outline promising lines of future economic research.
npj Climate Action, 2024
The net-zero transition poses unprecedented societal challenges that cannot be tackled with techn... more The net-zero transition poses unprecedented societal challenges that cannot be tackled with technology and markets alone. It requires complementary behavioral and social change on the demand side. Abandoning entrenched detrimental norms, including those that perpetuate the fossil-fueled lock-in, is notoriously difficult, preventing change and limiting policy efficacy. A nascent literature tackles social tipping interventions—STI, aiming at cost-effective disproportionate change by pushing behaviors past an adoption threshold beyond which further uptake is self-reinforcing. Intervening on target groups can greatly reduce the societal cost of a policy and thus holds promise for precipitating change. This article takes stock of the potential of STI to scale climate action by first reviewing the theoretical insights arising from behavioral public policy based on applications of threshold models from sociology and economics; then, it assesses the initial evidence on the effectiveness of STI, in light of the outcomes of laboratory and online experiments that were designed to study coordination on an emergent alternative to the initial status quo. Lastly, the article identifies potential conceptual limitations and proposes fruitful avenues for increasing the robustness of STI assessments beyond theory and small-scale experimentation.
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2024
International efforts to mitigate climate change are lagging behind. We study in an experiment a ... more International efforts to mitigate climate change are lagging behind. We study in an experiment a stylized climate club along the line of Nordhaus's proposal to assess the behavioral effects on cooperation and surplus. We also evaluate in isolation the effects of different elements of the club design. Overall, a climate club increases cooperation but not surplus, with respect to voluntary cooperation in a baseline public good game.
Nature Sustainability, 2023
Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors... more Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors. Similarly, nature has evolved a diverse portfolio of species to maintain ecosystem function amid environmental fluctuations. In urban planning, public health, transport and communications, food production, and other domains, however, this feature often seems ignored. As we enter an era of unprecedented turbulence at the planetary level, we argue that ample responses to this new reality-that is, response diversitycan no longer be taken for granted and must be actively designed and managed. We describe here what response diversity is, how it is expressed and how it can be enhanced and lost. On the morning of 23 March 2021, the giant container ship Ever Given was passing through the Suez Canal on its way to Rotterdam when it suddenly ran aground diagonally, blocking the entire canal. Because the ship was one of the largest in the world, traffic was jammed in both directions for six days. Hundreds of vessels came to a standstill, and billions of US dollars' worth of trade were lost given the lack of alternative routes and modes of transport. Disruptions at bottlenecks like this (Fig. 1) can have major consequences for billions of people, enterprises and nations, influencing food supplies, prices or access to spare parts, with potentially far-reaching social consequences 1 .
Annual Review of Resource Economics, 2021
In the wake of 25 United Nations Climate Change Conferences of the Parties (and counting), intern... more In the wake of 25 United Nations Climate Change Conferences of the Parties (and counting), international cooperation on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions to avoid substantial and potentially irreversible climate change remains an important challenge. The limited impact of the Kyoto Protocol on curbing emissions, and the gap between the ambitions of its successor and the Paris Agreement's lack of sanctioning mechanisms for addressing noncompliance, demonstrates both the difficulties in negotiating ambitious environmental agreements and the reluctance of countries to comply with their agreed emission targets once they have joined the treaty. Therefore, a better understanding of the obstacles and opportunities that the interactions between domestic and international policy pose for the design of successful international climate cooperation is of utmost importance. To shed light on the roots of the stalemate (and suggest possible ways out), this article reviews and draws lessons f...
But uncertainties risk reverting the game back to a 'prisoner's dilemma' and inaction... more But uncertainties risk reverting the game back to a 'prisoner's dilemma' and inaction, write Iris and Tavoni
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2020
Higher temperatures expected by midcentury increase the risk of shocks to crop production, while ... more Higher temperatures expected by midcentury increase the risk of shocks to crop production, while the interconnected nature of the current global food system functions to spread the impact of localized production shocks throughout the world. In this study, we analyze the global potential impact of a present-day event of equivalent magnitude to the US Dust Bowl, modeling the ways in which a sudden decline in US wheat production could cascade through the global network of agricultural trade. We use observations of country-level production, reserves, and trade data in a Food Shock Cascade model to explore trade adjustments and country-level inventory changes in response to a major, multiyear production decline. We find that a 4-year decline in wheat production of the same proportional magnitude as occurred during the Dust Bowl greatly reduces both wheat supply and reserves in the United States and propagates through the global trade network. By year 4 of the event, US wheat exports fall from 90.5 trillion kcal before the drought to 48 trillion to 52 trillion kcal, and the United States exhausts 94% of its reserves. As a result of reduced US exports, other countries meet their needs by leveraging their own reserves, leading to a 31% decline in wheat reserves globally. These findings demonstrate that an extreme production decline would lead to substantial supply shortfalls in both the United States and in other countries, where impacts outside the United States strongly depend on a country's reserves and on its relative position in the global trade network.
World Development, 2020
Climate change and global poverty are the most pressing issues of this century. If insufficiently... more Climate change and global poverty are the most pressing issues of this century. If insufficiently addressed, climate change will exacerbate poverty and inequality within and across nations. Addressing it requires that people in developed and developing countries adopt new behaviors and technologies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to a changing climate. A major contribution of the 2019 Nobel Laureates consists in providing new tools to advance knowledge on the mechanisms driving the diffusion of non-normative behaviors, by combining social network analysis with field experiments. To inform climate policy, we encourage research that applies this methodological innovation to understand the extent to which diffusion mechanisms may be crucial to accelerate the transition toward greener economies. Scholars working in developed countries have much to learn from recent advances in development economics. We identify fruitful areas for research in the global North.
Environment and Development Economics, 2019
With the aid of a lab experiment, we explored how imperfect monitoring and punishment networks im... more With the aid of a lab experiment, we explored how imperfect monitoring and punishment
networks impacted appropriation, punishment and beliefs in a common pool resource
appropriation dilemma. We studied the differences between the complete network (with
perfect monitoring and punishment, in which everyone can observe and punish everyone
else) and two ‘imperfect’ networks (that systematically reduce the number of subjects who
could monitor and punish others): the directed and undirected circle networks. We found
that free riders were punished in all treatments, but the network topology impacted the type
of punishment: the undirected circle induced more severe punishment and prosocial punishment
compared to the other two networks. Both imperfect networks were more efficient
because the larger punishment capacity available in the complete network elicited higher
punishment amount.
Environmental and Resource Economics, 2019
Many public goods cannot be provided directly by interested parties (e.g. citizens), as they enta... more Many public goods cannot be provided directly by interested parties (e.g. citizens), as they entail decision-making at nested hierarchical scales: at a lower level individuals elect a representative, while at a higher scale elected delegates decide on the provision level, with some degree of scrutiny from their constituency. Furthermore, many such decisions involve uncertainty about the magnitude of the contribution that is needed for the good to be provided (or bad to be avoided). In such circumstances delegates can serve as important vehicles for coordination by aggregating societal preferences for provision. Yet, the role of delegation in threshold public goods games is understudied. We contrast the behavior of delegates to that of self-representing individuals in the avoidance of a public bad in an experimental setting. We randomly assign twelve subjects into four teams and ask each team to elect a delegate via majority voting. The elected delegates play several variants of a one-shot public goods game in which losses can ensue if the sum of their contributions falls short of a threshold. We find that when delegation is coupled with a mild form of public pressure, it has a significantly negative effect on contributions, even though the non-delegates can only signal their preferred levels of public good contributions. The reason is that delegates give more weight to the least cooperative suggestion: they focus on the lower of the two public good contributions recommended by their teammates. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https ://doi.
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2019
Climate change is a global externality that has proven difficult to address through formal instit... more Climate change is a global externality that has proven difficult to address through formal institutions alone due to the public good properties of climate change mitigation and the lack of a supranational institution for enforcing global treaties. Given these circumstances, which are arguably the most challenging for international cooperation, commitment problems and free-riding incentives for countries to delay costly mitigation efforts are major obstacles to effective environmental agreements. Starting from this premise, we examine domestic mitigation efforts, with the goal of assessing the extent to which the willingness of individuals to contribute voluntarily to the public good of climate mitigation could be scaled up to the global level. Although individual environmental actions are clearly insufficient for achieving ambitious global mitigation targets, we argue that they are nevertheless initial and essential steps in the right direction. In fact, individual and community efforts may be particularly important if local interventions encourage shifts in norms and behaviors that favor large-scale transformations. With this in mind, we discuss the importance of the visibility of norms and the role of beliefs when such visibility is lacking and their implications for leveraging cooperative behavior to increase climate mitigation efforts locally and globally.
We study the impact of loss-aversion and the threat of critical damages from insufficient polluta... more We study the impact of loss-aversion and the threat of critical damages from insufficient pollutant abatement, which we jointly call threshold concerns, on the outcome of international environmental agreements. We aim to understand whether concerns for a critical level of damages induce cooperation among countries faced with the well-known free-riding problem, and yield sufficient emission reductions to avoid exceeding the threshold. Specifically, we focus on loss-averse countries negotiating under the threat of either high or low environmental damages. Under symmetry, when countries display identical degrees of threshold concern, we show that such beliefs have a positive effect on reducing the emission levels of both signatories to the treaty and non-signatories, leading to weakly larger coalitions of signatories than in the absence of reference dependence. We then introduce asymmetry, by allowing countries to differ in the degree of concern about the damages. We show that stable coalitions are mostly formed by the countries with higher threshold concerns. When enough countries exhibit standard preferences, the coalition size may diminish, regardless of the degree of concern by the others.
Climate negotiation outcomes are diicult to evaluate objectively because there are no clear refer... more Climate negotiation outcomes are diicult to evaluate objectively because there are no clear reference scenarios. Subjective assessments from those directly involved in the negotiations are particularly important, as this may influence strategy and future negotiation participation. Here we analyse the perceived success of the climate negotiations in a sample of 656 experts involved in international climate policy. Respondents were pessimistic when asked for specific assessments of the current approach centred on voluntary pledges, but were more optimistic when asked for general assessments of the outcomes and usefulness of the climate negotiations. Individuals who were more involved in the negotiation process tended to be more optimistic, especially in terms of general assessments. Our results indicate that two reinforcing eeects are at work: a high degree of involvement changes individuals' perceptions and more optimistic individuals are more inclined to remain involved in the negotiations.
The recent global climate change agreement in Paris leaves a wide gap between pledged and requisi... more The recent global climate change agreement in Paris leaves a wide gap between pledged and requisite emissions reductions in keeping with the commonly accepted 2 °C target. A recent strand of theoretical and experimental evidence establishes pessimistic predictions concerning the ability of comprehensive global environmental agreements to improve upon the business-as-usual trajectory. We introduce an economic experiment focusing on the dynamics of the negotiation process by observing subjects' behavior in a Nash bargaining game. Throughout repeated rounds, heterogeneous players bargain over the allocation of a fixed amount of profit-generating emissions with significant losses attached to prolonged failure to reach agreement. We find that the existence of side agreements that constrain individual demands among a subset of like countries does not ensure success; however, such side agreements reduce the demands of high-emission parties. Our results highlight the importance of strong signals among high emitters in reaching agreement to shoulder a collective emission reduction target.
The bottom-up approach promoted through the Paris Agreement and signed in 2016 requires the defin... more The bottom-up approach promoted through the Paris Agreement and signed in 2016 requires the definition of accurate and realistic national pathways to cut emissions. A recent study applied to the UK energy system shows that current UK policy on climate change is incompatible with the most stringent climate objectives.
We explore the prospects of cooperation in a threshold public bad game. The experi-ment's setup a... more We explore the prospects of cooperation in a threshold public bad game. The experi-ment's setup allows us to investigate the issue of effort coordination between signatories and non-signatories to a climate agreement under the threat of a catastrophe. Motivated actors may signal willingness to lead by committing a share of investments to a 'clean' but less remunerative project. The game is parametrized such that the externality cannot be fully internalized by the coalition, so that some effort on the part of the second-movers is required if the catastrophic losses are to be avoided. We manipulate both the relative returns of two investments and the extent to which the gains from leadership diffuse to second-movers. We find that the likelihood of reaching a sizeable coalition of early investors in the clean technology is higher when the benefits are appropriated by the coalition. Conversely, spillovers can entice second-movers' adoption.
Effective responses to climate change may demand a radical shift in human lifestyles away from se... more Effective responses to climate change may demand a radical shift in human lifestyles away from self-interest for material gain, towards self-restraint for the public good. The challenge then lies in sustaining cooperative mitiga-tion against the temptation to free-ride on others' contributions, which can undermine public endeavours. When all possible future scenarios entail costs, however, the rationale for contributing to a public good changes from altruistic sacrifice of personal profit to necessary investment in minimizing personal debt. Here we demonstrate analytically how an economic framework of costly adaptation to climate change can sustain cooperative mitiga-tion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We develop game-theoretic scenarios from existing examples of insurance for adaptation to natural hazards exacerbated by climate-change that bring the debt burden from future climate events into the present. We model the as-yet untried potential for leveraging public contributions to mit-igation from personal costs of adaptation insurance, by discounting the insurance premium in proportion to progress towards a mitigation target. We show that collective mitigation targets are feasible for individuals as well as nations, provided that the premium for adaptation insurance in the event of no mitigation is at least four times larger than the mitigation target per player. This prediction is robust to players having unequal vulner-abilities, wealth, and abilities to pay. We enumerate the effects of these inequalities on payoffs to players under various sub-optimal conditions. We conclude that progress in mitigation is hindered by its current association with a social dilemma, which disappears upon confronting the bleak consequences of inaction.
Ensuring food security requires food production and distribution systems function throughout disr... more Ensuring food security requires food production and distribution systems function throughout
disruptions. Understanding the factors that contribute to the global food system’s ability to respond
and adapt to such disruptions (i.e. resilience) is critical for understanding the long-term
sustainability of human populations. Variable impacts of production shocks on food supply between
countries indicate a need for national-scale resilience indicators that can provide global
comparisons. However, methods for tracking changes in resilience have had limited application to
food systems. We developed an indicator-based analysis of food systems resilience for the years
1992–2011. Our approach is based on three dimensions of resilience: socio-economic access to food
in terms of income of the poorest quintile relative to food prices, biophysical capacity to intensify or
extensify food production, and the magnitude and diversity of current domestic food production.
The socio-economic indicator has a large variability, but with low values concentrated in Africa and
Asia. The biophysical capacity indicator is highest in Africa and Eastern Europe, in part because of a
high potential for extensification of cropland and for yield gap closure in cultivated areas. However,
the biophysical capacity indicator has declined globally in recent years. The production diversity
indicator has increased slightly, with a relatively even geographic distribution. Few countries had
exclusively high or low values for all indicators. Collectively, these results are the basis for global
comparisons of resilience between countries, and provide necessary context for developing
generalizations about resilience in the global food system.
This paper analyzes the decision of " green " economists to participate in the carbon offset mark... more This paper analyzes the decision of " green " economists to participate in the carbon offset market, and how this decision is related with the views that these experts hold on offsets. It also compares the preferences of economists with those of the general public, as emphasized in the literature. The paper exploits a unique dataset examining the decision to purchase carbon offsets at two academic conferences in environmental and ecological economics. We find that having the conference expenses covered by one's institution increases the likelihood of offsetting, but practical and ethical reservations as well as personal characteristics and preferences also play an important role. We focus on the effect of objecting to the use of offsets and discuss the implications for practitioners and policy-makers. Based on our findings, we suggest that ecological and environmental economists should be more involved in the design and use of carbon offsets. Corresponding author: s.carattini@lse.ac.uk. We thank Timothy Foxon, Jasper Kenter, Irene Ring and Julia Steinberger from ESEE, as well as Monica Eberle, Markku Ollikainen, Sampo Pihlainen and Olli Tahvonen from EAERE, for help with both administering the survey and sourcing data on the participants. We are also grateful to the participants of the ESEE and EAERE conferences who took part in our study, and to Greer Gosnell and two anonymous referees for very useful comments. We also thank Matthew Kotchen for very insightful conversations. Carattini acknowledges support from COST Action IS1309 "Innovations in Climate Governance: Sources, Patterns and Effects" (INOGOV)
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2024
Solar geoengineering denotes a set of technologies that would enable a fast and relatively cheap ... more Solar geoengineering denotes a set of technologies that would enable a fast and relatively cheap global temperature reduction. Besides potential physical side-effects, a major concern is the strategic dimension: Who is going to use solar geoengineering and how would it affect others? How does the presence of solar geoengineering change the strategic incentives surrounding other climate policy instruments such as mitigation? We review the existing theoretical and experimental contributions to those questions and outline promising lines of future economic research.
npj Climate Action, 2024
The net-zero transition poses unprecedented societal challenges that cannot be tackled with techn... more The net-zero transition poses unprecedented societal challenges that cannot be tackled with technology and markets alone. It requires complementary behavioral and social change on the demand side. Abandoning entrenched detrimental norms, including those that perpetuate the fossil-fueled lock-in, is notoriously difficult, preventing change and limiting policy efficacy. A nascent literature tackles social tipping interventions—STI, aiming at cost-effective disproportionate change by pushing behaviors past an adoption threshold beyond which further uptake is self-reinforcing. Intervening on target groups can greatly reduce the societal cost of a policy and thus holds promise for precipitating change. This article takes stock of the potential of STI to scale climate action by first reviewing the theoretical insights arising from behavioral public policy based on applications of threshold models from sociology and economics; then, it assesses the initial evidence on the effectiveness of STI, in light of the outcomes of laboratory and online experiments that were designed to study coordination on an emergent alternative to the initial status quo. Lastly, the article identifies potential conceptual limitations and proposes fruitful avenues for increasing the robustness of STI assessments beyond theory and small-scale experimentation.
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2024
International efforts to mitigate climate change are lagging behind. We study in an experiment a ... more International efforts to mitigate climate change are lagging behind. We study in an experiment a stylized climate club along the line of Nordhaus's proposal to assess the behavioral effects on cooperation and surplus. We also evaluate in isolation the effects of different elements of the club design. Overall, a climate club increases cooperation but not surplus, with respect to voluntary cooperation in a baseline public good game.
Nature Sustainability, 2023
Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors... more Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors. Similarly, nature has evolved a diverse portfolio of species to maintain ecosystem function amid environmental fluctuations. In urban planning, public health, transport and communications, food production, and other domains, however, this feature often seems ignored. As we enter an era of unprecedented turbulence at the planetary level, we argue that ample responses to this new reality-that is, response diversitycan no longer be taken for granted and must be actively designed and managed. We describe here what response diversity is, how it is expressed and how it can be enhanced and lost. On the morning of 23 March 2021, the giant container ship Ever Given was passing through the Suez Canal on its way to Rotterdam when it suddenly ran aground diagonally, blocking the entire canal. Because the ship was one of the largest in the world, traffic was jammed in both directions for six days. Hundreds of vessels came to a standstill, and billions of US dollars' worth of trade were lost given the lack of alternative routes and modes of transport. Disruptions at bottlenecks like this (Fig. 1) can have major consequences for billions of people, enterprises and nations, influencing food supplies, prices or access to spare parts, with potentially far-reaching social consequences 1 .
Annual Review of Resource Economics, 2021
In the wake of 25 United Nations Climate Change Conferences of the Parties (and counting), intern... more In the wake of 25 United Nations Climate Change Conferences of the Parties (and counting), international cooperation on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions to avoid substantial and potentially irreversible climate change remains an important challenge. The limited impact of the Kyoto Protocol on curbing emissions, and the gap between the ambitions of its successor and the Paris Agreement's lack of sanctioning mechanisms for addressing noncompliance, demonstrates both the difficulties in negotiating ambitious environmental agreements and the reluctance of countries to comply with their agreed emission targets once they have joined the treaty. Therefore, a better understanding of the obstacles and opportunities that the interactions between domestic and international policy pose for the design of successful international climate cooperation is of utmost importance. To shed light on the roots of the stalemate (and suggest possible ways out), this article reviews and draws lessons f...
But uncertainties risk reverting the game back to a 'prisoner's dilemma' and inaction... more But uncertainties risk reverting the game back to a 'prisoner's dilemma' and inaction, write Iris and Tavoni
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2020
Higher temperatures expected by midcentury increase the risk of shocks to crop production, while ... more Higher temperatures expected by midcentury increase the risk of shocks to crop production, while the interconnected nature of the current global food system functions to spread the impact of localized production shocks throughout the world. In this study, we analyze the global potential impact of a present-day event of equivalent magnitude to the US Dust Bowl, modeling the ways in which a sudden decline in US wheat production could cascade through the global network of agricultural trade. We use observations of country-level production, reserves, and trade data in a Food Shock Cascade model to explore trade adjustments and country-level inventory changes in response to a major, multiyear production decline. We find that a 4-year decline in wheat production of the same proportional magnitude as occurred during the Dust Bowl greatly reduces both wheat supply and reserves in the United States and propagates through the global trade network. By year 4 of the event, US wheat exports fall from 90.5 trillion kcal before the drought to 48 trillion to 52 trillion kcal, and the United States exhausts 94% of its reserves. As a result of reduced US exports, other countries meet their needs by leveraging their own reserves, leading to a 31% decline in wheat reserves globally. These findings demonstrate that an extreme production decline would lead to substantial supply shortfalls in both the United States and in other countries, where impacts outside the United States strongly depend on a country's reserves and on its relative position in the global trade network.
World Development, 2020
Climate change and global poverty are the most pressing issues of this century. If insufficiently... more Climate change and global poverty are the most pressing issues of this century. If insufficiently addressed, climate change will exacerbate poverty and inequality within and across nations. Addressing it requires that people in developed and developing countries adopt new behaviors and technologies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to a changing climate. A major contribution of the 2019 Nobel Laureates consists in providing new tools to advance knowledge on the mechanisms driving the diffusion of non-normative behaviors, by combining social network analysis with field experiments. To inform climate policy, we encourage research that applies this methodological innovation to understand the extent to which diffusion mechanisms may be crucial to accelerate the transition toward greener economies. Scholars working in developed countries have much to learn from recent advances in development economics. We identify fruitful areas for research in the global North.
Environment and Development Economics, 2019
With the aid of a lab experiment, we explored how imperfect monitoring and punishment networks im... more With the aid of a lab experiment, we explored how imperfect monitoring and punishment
networks impacted appropriation, punishment and beliefs in a common pool resource
appropriation dilemma. We studied the differences between the complete network (with
perfect monitoring and punishment, in which everyone can observe and punish everyone
else) and two ‘imperfect’ networks (that systematically reduce the number of subjects who
could monitor and punish others): the directed and undirected circle networks. We found
that free riders were punished in all treatments, but the network topology impacted the type
of punishment: the undirected circle induced more severe punishment and prosocial punishment
compared to the other two networks. Both imperfect networks were more efficient
because the larger punishment capacity available in the complete network elicited higher
punishment amount.
Environmental and Resource Economics, 2019
Many public goods cannot be provided directly by interested parties (e.g. citizens), as they enta... more Many public goods cannot be provided directly by interested parties (e.g. citizens), as they entail decision-making at nested hierarchical scales: at a lower level individuals elect a representative, while at a higher scale elected delegates decide on the provision level, with some degree of scrutiny from their constituency. Furthermore, many such decisions involve uncertainty about the magnitude of the contribution that is needed for the good to be provided (or bad to be avoided). In such circumstances delegates can serve as important vehicles for coordination by aggregating societal preferences for provision. Yet, the role of delegation in threshold public goods games is understudied. We contrast the behavior of delegates to that of self-representing individuals in the avoidance of a public bad in an experimental setting. We randomly assign twelve subjects into four teams and ask each team to elect a delegate via majority voting. The elected delegates play several variants of a one-shot public goods game in which losses can ensue if the sum of their contributions falls short of a threshold. We find that when delegation is coupled with a mild form of public pressure, it has a significantly negative effect on contributions, even though the non-delegates can only signal their preferred levels of public good contributions. The reason is that delegates give more weight to the least cooperative suggestion: they focus on the lower of the two public good contributions recommended by their teammates. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https ://doi.
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2019
Climate change is a global externality that has proven difficult to address through formal instit... more Climate change is a global externality that has proven difficult to address through formal institutions alone due to the public good properties of climate change mitigation and the lack of a supranational institution for enforcing global treaties. Given these circumstances, which are arguably the most challenging for international cooperation, commitment problems and free-riding incentives for countries to delay costly mitigation efforts are major obstacles to effective environmental agreements. Starting from this premise, we examine domestic mitigation efforts, with the goal of assessing the extent to which the willingness of individuals to contribute voluntarily to the public good of climate mitigation could be scaled up to the global level. Although individual environmental actions are clearly insufficient for achieving ambitious global mitigation targets, we argue that they are nevertheless initial and essential steps in the right direction. In fact, individual and community efforts may be particularly important if local interventions encourage shifts in norms and behaviors that favor large-scale transformations. With this in mind, we discuss the importance of the visibility of norms and the role of beliefs when such visibility is lacking and their implications for leveraging cooperative behavior to increase climate mitigation efforts locally and globally.
We study the impact of loss-aversion and the threat of critical damages from insufficient polluta... more We study the impact of loss-aversion and the threat of critical damages from insufficient pollutant abatement, which we jointly call threshold concerns, on the outcome of international environmental agreements. We aim to understand whether concerns for a critical level of damages induce cooperation among countries faced with the well-known free-riding problem, and yield sufficient emission reductions to avoid exceeding the threshold. Specifically, we focus on loss-averse countries negotiating under the threat of either high or low environmental damages. Under symmetry, when countries display identical degrees of threshold concern, we show that such beliefs have a positive effect on reducing the emission levels of both signatories to the treaty and non-signatories, leading to weakly larger coalitions of signatories than in the absence of reference dependence. We then introduce asymmetry, by allowing countries to differ in the degree of concern about the damages. We show that stable coalitions are mostly formed by the countries with higher threshold concerns. When enough countries exhibit standard preferences, the coalition size may diminish, regardless of the degree of concern by the others.
Climate negotiation outcomes are diicult to evaluate objectively because there are no clear refer... more Climate negotiation outcomes are diicult to evaluate objectively because there are no clear reference scenarios. Subjective assessments from those directly involved in the negotiations are particularly important, as this may influence strategy and future negotiation participation. Here we analyse the perceived success of the climate negotiations in a sample of 656 experts involved in international climate policy. Respondents were pessimistic when asked for specific assessments of the current approach centred on voluntary pledges, but were more optimistic when asked for general assessments of the outcomes and usefulness of the climate negotiations. Individuals who were more involved in the negotiation process tended to be more optimistic, especially in terms of general assessments. Our results indicate that two reinforcing eeects are at work: a high degree of involvement changes individuals' perceptions and more optimistic individuals are more inclined to remain involved in the negotiations.
The recent global climate change agreement in Paris leaves a wide gap between pledged and requisi... more The recent global climate change agreement in Paris leaves a wide gap between pledged and requisite emissions reductions in keeping with the commonly accepted 2 °C target. A recent strand of theoretical and experimental evidence establishes pessimistic predictions concerning the ability of comprehensive global environmental agreements to improve upon the business-as-usual trajectory. We introduce an economic experiment focusing on the dynamics of the negotiation process by observing subjects' behavior in a Nash bargaining game. Throughout repeated rounds, heterogeneous players bargain over the allocation of a fixed amount of profit-generating emissions with significant losses attached to prolonged failure to reach agreement. We find that the existence of side agreements that constrain individual demands among a subset of like countries does not ensure success; however, such side agreements reduce the demands of high-emission parties. Our results highlight the importance of strong signals among high emitters in reaching agreement to shoulder a collective emission reduction target.
The bottom-up approach promoted through the Paris Agreement and signed in 2016 requires the defin... more The bottom-up approach promoted through the Paris Agreement and signed in 2016 requires the definition of accurate and realistic national pathways to cut emissions. A recent study applied to the UK energy system shows that current UK policy on climate change is incompatible with the most stringent climate objectives.
We explore the prospects of cooperation in a threshold public bad game. The experi-ment's setup a... more We explore the prospects of cooperation in a threshold public bad game. The experi-ment's setup allows us to investigate the issue of effort coordination between signatories and non-signatories to a climate agreement under the threat of a catastrophe. Motivated actors may signal willingness to lead by committing a share of investments to a 'clean' but less remunerative project. The game is parametrized such that the externality cannot be fully internalized by the coalition, so that some effort on the part of the second-movers is required if the catastrophic losses are to be avoided. We manipulate both the relative returns of two investments and the extent to which the gains from leadership diffuse to second-movers. We find that the likelihood of reaching a sizeable coalition of early investors in the clean technology is higher when the benefits are appropriated by the coalition. Conversely, spillovers can entice second-movers' adoption.
Effective responses to climate change may demand a radical shift in human lifestyles away from se... more Effective responses to climate change may demand a radical shift in human lifestyles away from self-interest for material gain, towards self-restraint for the public good. The challenge then lies in sustaining cooperative mitiga-tion against the temptation to free-ride on others' contributions, which can undermine public endeavours. When all possible future scenarios entail costs, however, the rationale for contributing to a public good changes from altruistic sacrifice of personal profit to necessary investment in minimizing personal debt. Here we demonstrate analytically how an economic framework of costly adaptation to climate change can sustain cooperative mitiga-tion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We develop game-theoretic scenarios from existing examples of insurance for adaptation to natural hazards exacerbated by climate-change that bring the debt burden from future climate events into the present. We model the as-yet untried potential for leveraging public contributions to mit-igation from personal costs of adaptation insurance, by discounting the insurance premium in proportion to progress towards a mitigation target. We show that collective mitigation targets are feasible for individuals as well as nations, provided that the premium for adaptation insurance in the event of no mitigation is at least four times larger than the mitigation target per player. This prediction is robust to players having unequal vulner-abilities, wealth, and abilities to pay. We enumerate the effects of these inequalities on payoffs to players under various sub-optimal conditions. We conclude that progress in mitigation is hindered by its current association with a social dilemma, which disappears upon confronting the bleak consequences of inaction.
Ensuring food security requires food production and distribution systems function throughout disr... more Ensuring food security requires food production and distribution systems function throughout
disruptions. Understanding the factors that contribute to the global food system’s ability to respond
and adapt to such disruptions (i.e. resilience) is critical for understanding the long-term
sustainability of human populations. Variable impacts of production shocks on food supply between
countries indicate a need for national-scale resilience indicators that can provide global
comparisons. However, methods for tracking changes in resilience have had limited application to
food systems. We developed an indicator-based analysis of food systems resilience for the years
1992–2011. Our approach is based on three dimensions of resilience: socio-economic access to food
in terms of income of the poorest quintile relative to food prices, biophysical capacity to intensify or
extensify food production, and the magnitude and diversity of current domestic food production.
The socio-economic indicator has a large variability, but with low values concentrated in Africa and
Asia. The biophysical capacity indicator is highest in Africa and Eastern Europe, in part because of a
high potential for extensification of cropland and for yield gap closure in cultivated areas. However,
the biophysical capacity indicator has declined globally in recent years. The production diversity
indicator has increased slightly, with a relatively even geographic distribution. Few countries had
exclusively high or low values for all indicators. Collectively, these results are the basis for global
comparisons of resilience between countries, and provide necessary context for developing
generalizations about resilience in the global food system.
This paper analyzes the decision of " green " economists to participate in the carbon offset mark... more This paper analyzes the decision of " green " economists to participate in the carbon offset market, and how this decision is related with the views that these experts hold on offsets. It also compares the preferences of economists with those of the general public, as emphasized in the literature. The paper exploits a unique dataset examining the decision to purchase carbon offsets at two academic conferences in environmental and ecological economics. We find that having the conference expenses covered by one's institution increases the likelihood of offsetting, but practical and ethical reservations as well as personal characteristics and preferences also play an important role. We focus on the effect of objecting to the use of offsets and discuss the implications for practitioners and policy-makers. Based on our findings, we suggest that ecological and environmental economists should be more involved in the design and use of carbon offsets. Corresponding author: s.carattini@lse.ac.uk. We thank Timothy Foxon, Jasper Kenter, Irene Ring and Julia Steinberger from ESEE, as well as Monica Eberle, Markku Ollikainen, Sampo Pihlainen and Olli Tahvonen from EAERE, for help with both administering the survey and sourcing data on the participants. We are also grateful to the participants of the ESEE and EAERE conferences who took part in our study, and to Greer Gosnell and two anonymous referees for very useful comments. We also thank Matthew Kotchen for very insightful conversations. Carattini acknowledges support from COST Action IS1309 "Innovations in Climate Governance: Sources, Patterns and Effects" (INOGOV)
The conservation of local commons is dependent on the cooperation of users that restrain themselv... more The conservation of local commons is dependent on the cooperation of users that restrain themselves from individual short-sighted resource overexploitation. Maintaining cooperation against the self interest of the individual users and despite environmental pressure is a challenging task that depends on a multitude of factors.
The provision of global public goods, such as climate change mitigation and managing fisheries to... more The provision of global public goods, such as climate change mitigation and managing fisheries to avoid overharvesting, requires the coordination of national contributions. The contributions are managed by elected governments who, in turn, are subject to public pressure on the matter. In an experimental setting, we randomly assign subjects into four teams, and ask them to elect a delegate through the mechanism of majority voting. The elected delegates play several variants of a one-shot public goods game in which losses can ensue if the sum of their contributions falls short of a threshold. Earnings are split evenly among the team members, including the delegate. We find that delegation alone causes a small reduction in the group contributions. When delegation is coupled with public pressure, in the form of teammates' messages to their delegate, it has a significantly negative effect on contributions, even though the messages are restricted to payoff-inconsequential suggested contributions (cheap talk). The reason is that delegates appear to give more weight to the least ambitious message: they focus on the lower of the two public good contributions suggested by their teammates.
We explore the prospects of cooperation in a threshold public bad game. The coalition formation s... more We explore the prospects of cooperation in a threshold public bad game. The coalition formation setup of the experiment allows us to investigate the issue of effort coordination between signatories and non-signatories to a climate agreement under the threat of an impending catastrophe. In the game, motivated actors may signal willingness to lead by committing a share of investments to a " clean " but less remunerative project. The game is parametrized such that the externality cannot be fully internalized by the coalition, so that some effort on the part of the second movers is required if the catastrophic losses are to be avoided. We manipulate both the relative returns of two investments and the extent to which the gains from leadership diffuse to second movers. We find that the likelihood of reaching a sizeable coalition of early investors in the clean technology is higher when the benefits are fully appropriated by the coalition. Conversely, spillovers can entice second movers to adopt the clean technology. Abstract We explore the prospects of cooperation in a threshold public bad experiment. The coalition
The market for voluntary carbon osets has grown steadily in the last decade, yet it remains a ver... more The market for voluntary carbon osets has grown steadily in the last decade, yet it remains a very small niche. Most emissions from business travel are still not oset. This paper exploits a unique dataset examining the decision to purchase carbon osets at two academic conferences in environmental and ecological economics. We nd that having the conference expenses covered by one's institution increases the likelihood of osetting, but practical and ethical reservations as well as personal characteristics and preferences also play an important role. We draw lessons from the eect of objections on the use of osets and discuss the implications for practitioners and policy-makers. Based on our ndings, we conclude that ecological and environmental economists should be more involved in the design and use of carbon osets.