What about the others? Conditional cooperation, climate change perception and ecological actions

Leonardo Becchetti, Gianluigi Conzo and Francesco Salustri

Ecological Economics, 2025, vol. 227, issue C

Abstract: Climate challenge can be modelled as a multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma where ecological action – e.g., purchasing an electric car or adopting sustainable life-styles – is costly in terms of economic resources, time, and effort. The prisoner’s dilemma structure of the game implies that, even though the social benefit is maximized – and every player would be better off – with everyone taking ecological actions, the strategy profile with no player taking action is a Nash equilibrium, assuming players have purely self-regarding preferences. In this paper we analyse how this ecological dilemma is affected by people’s perceptions. Using the European Social Survey, we study how urgent the climate threat is perceived by respondents and their beliefs about other countries’ actions. Theoretical predictions suggest that the former increases, while the latter does not affect individual willingness to act ecologically when introducing heterogeneity about the effect of worry on intrinsic motivations. Our empirical findings however show that both factors positively affect willingness to act. We interpret the positive effect by arguing that intrinsic motivations are also affected by other people action and show that the effect is weaker as social capital increases.

Keywords: Climate change; Perception; Ecological actions; Social dilemma; Conditional cooperation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H41 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800924002684
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: What about the others? Conditional cooperation, climate change perception and ecological actions (2023)
Working Paper: What about the others? Conditional cooperation, climate change perception and ecological actions (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:227:y:2025:i:c:s0921800924002684

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108371

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().