Climate change in a public goods game: Investment decision in mitigation versus adaptation

Reviva Hasson, Åsa Löfgren and Martine Visser

Ecological Economics, 2010, vol. 70, issue 2, 331-338

Abstract: We use behavioral and experimental economics to study a particular aspect of the economics of climate change: the potential trade-off between countries' investments in mitigation versus adaptation. While mitigation of greenhouse gases can be viewed as a public good, adaptation to climate change is a private good, benefiting only the country or the individual that invests in adaptation. We use a one-shot public-goods game that deviates from the standard public-goods game by introducing a stochastic term to account for probabilistic destruction in a climate-change setting, where the probability density function is mapped to within-group levels of mitigation. We compare low-vulnerability and high-vulnerability treatments by varying the magnitude of disaster across treatments. Our results show that there is no significant difference in the level of mitigation across these treatments. Further, our results emphasize the role of trust in enhancing cooperation.

Keywords: Public; good; Climate; change; Mitigation; Adaptation; Experiment; Risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921-8009(10)00345-9
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Climate Change in a Public Goods Game: Investment Decision in Mitigation versus Adaptation (2009)
Working Paper: Climate Change in a Public Goods Game: Investment Decision in Mitigation versus Adaptation (2009)
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:70:y:2010:i:2:p:331-338

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 ().