Tipping Points and Loss Aversion in International Environmental Agreements

Doruk İriş () and Alessandro Tavoni ()

No 2016.25, Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei

Abstract: We study the impact of loss-aversion and the threat of catastrophic damages, which we jointly call threshold concerns, on international environmental agreements. We aim to understand whether a threshold for dangerous climate change is as an effective coordination device for countries to overcome the global free-riding problem and abate sufficiently to avoid disaster. We focus on loss-averse countries negotiating either under the threat of either high environmental damages (loss domain), or low damages (gain domain). Under symmetry, that is 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 higher global welfare and weakly larger coalitions of signatories. We then introduce asymmetry, by allowing countries to differ in the degree of concern about the threat of disaster. We show that stable coalitions are mostly formed by the countries with higher threshold concern. When enough countries having no threshold concern could cause the coalition size to diminish, regardless of the other countries have strong or mild threshold concerns.

Keywords: Catastrophic Climate Change; Threshold; Loss-Aversion; International Environmental Agreements; Coalition Formation Game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D0 D03 Q5 Q50 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Tipping Points and Loss Aversion in International Environmental Agreements (2016)
Working Paper: Tipping Points and Loss Aversion in International Environmental Agreements (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fem:femwpa:2016.25

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